GASTHOF 2002 Book

GASTHOF 2002 STÄDELSCHULE FRANKFURT/M.

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GASTHOF 2002 DIRK FLEISCHMANN & JOCHEN VOLZ

A STRANGE QUESTION, PERHAPS, BUT HARDLY A SUPERFLUOUS ONE: WHAT IS AN ART ACADEMY? DANIEL BIRNBAUM

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MARTIN FRITZ

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I AM...

RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA

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THE ALLIANZ KULTURSTIFTUNG IN PARTNERSHIP WITH GASTHOF 2002 DR. LUDGER HÜNNEKENS

I CAN’T GO ON, I WILL GO ON STÉPHANIE MOISDON TREMBLEY

THIS IS GASTHOF! STÉPHANIE MOISDON TREMBLEY

IARA BOUBNOVA PICNIC IN CULTURE

MICROWAVE MUSIC JOHN ARMLEDER

UTOPIAN ACADEMY AS A MODERNIST MYTH JÜRGEN BOCK

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JULY 26 // FRIDAY

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SARAT MAHARAJ

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JULY 24 // WEDNESDAY

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PROJECTS

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JULY 25 // THURSDAY

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REAL PRESENCE 2 – FLASHBACK GASTHOF 2002 BILJANA TOMIC

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REAL PRESENCE – GENERATION 2001 / GASTHOF / REAL PRESENCE & FLASHBACK DOBRILA DENEGRI

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GASTHOF ROBERT FLECK

// CONTENT

THE SEARCH FOR CONCEPTUAL INTIMACY CLÉMENTINE DELISS

JULY 27 // SATURDAY

SCENES OF A FRIENDSHIP ISABELLE GRAW

EVER HANS ULRICH OBRIST & PHILIPPE PARRENO

JULY 30 // TUESDAY

JULY 31 // WEDNESDAY

PROJECTS

ONGOING PROJECTS

JULY 28 // SUNDAY

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SPECULATION MACHINES OR WHY DON’T YOU LEAVE THE INSTITUTION AND GO AND DO SOMETHING MORE USEFUL INSTEAD? CHARLES ESCHE

JULY 29 // MONDAY

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MENUE LISBON

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MENUE VIENNA

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MENUE FRANKFURT

90 RECIPES

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THE BANQUET OF MERCILESS REGRET LAURIE HAYCOCK MAKELA & RONALD JONES

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TAKE IT SATCH! THOMAS BAYRLE

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COLOPHON

The Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Städelschule (Frankfurt am Main) in collaboration with Studentski Kulturni Centar (Belgrade), Institute For Contemporary Art (Moscow), Escola de Artes Visuais, Maumaus (Lisbon), Protoacademy (Edinburgh), Martin Fritz and Rirkrit Tiravanija took the initiative to organize a week with a special program in addition to two of the most important European contemporary art exhibitions, Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt and Documenta 11 in Kassel. The idea was to host and to bring together over 200 art students from more than 30 countries at the Städelschule and to provide them with an infrastructure which could enable them to experience both art exhibitions and get in contact with a wide range of international colleagues and artists who were specially invited to host workshops with the students.

GASTHOF functioned as a kind of home base: A forum for theoretical reflection as well as recreation and communication. Participants lived at the Städelschule for one week and joined workshops on the nature of GASTHOF. They were invited to reflect on the issues of hospitality, cooking and music and to investigate on their relevance to visual art.

Facing current political tendencies in various European countries, international dialogue is a necessity, and hospitality as an approach and a method within the arts needs to be discussed.

The participants were integrated directly into all activities. They were asked to present their practices related to cooking, food production and consumption, recycling, sound, music, speech, acoustic art, radio, noise etc. to generate discussions concerning production and research.

GASTHOF was not entirely new to the Städelschule. For a long time, the cooking class of the Städelschule together with the former

// DIRK FLEISCHMANN & JOCHEN VOLZ

professor Peter Kubelka organised a special cooking event called „Gasthaus” in the centre hall of the art academy at the end of each summer semester. GASTHOF was an extension of this idea.

In April 2001, Portikus Frankfurt am Main – an exhibition space which is closely linked to the art academy – hosted Rirkrit Tiravanija´s „Demo Station“, a project based on all kinds of activities from cooking, concerts and lectures to dance performances, bar nights and fashion shows. This exhibition was the starting point for Tiravanija´s visiting professorship at the Städelschule. „Gasthaus” and „Demo Station” provided the perfect soil when Dirk Fleischmann, in June 2001, introduced the idea of turning the art academy temporarily into a fundamentally different structure. A large inspiration for the students‘ engagement was finally the experience of „REAL PRESENCE” in Belgrade, an international workshop for art students, which proved the need of mutual exchange of professional and amateur experiences across art academies from all over Europe.

A stage, placed in a circus tent near the Städelschule at the Main river, was offered as a research laboratory for the student activities and a discussion platform with artists, scientists and theoreticians such as John M. Armleder, Miriam Bäckström, Thomas Bayrle, Daniel Birnbaum, Jürgen Bock, Iara Boubnova, Peter Cook, Clémentine Deliss, Dobrila Denegri, Florence Derieux, Ay¸se Erkmen, Charles Esche, Robert Fleck, Isabelle Graw, Søren Grammel, Carsten Höller, Ronald Jones, Maria Lind, Sarat Maharaj, Laurie Makela, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Philippe Parreno, Tobias Rehberger, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Biljana Tomic, Stéphanie Moisdon-Trembley and Heimo Zobernig.

extension of the conventional models of an art academy today.

We wish to express our gratitude to Karin Hartung, Sebastian Stöhrer and Christian Zickler for running the kitchens and supporting the students in realizing the cooking events, which were the heart of GASTHOF. A big Thank You to Helga and Hartmut Rausch for their patience and unconventional engagement and to Melanie Bouteloup, who was a big help in the preparation and coordination of GASTHOF. Many thanks to Anette Babl, Steffi Kettel, Dogan Özdogan and Katharina Schücke for maintaining the Café/Bar „Wasserhäuschen” and providing us with cool drinks all day and night.

We also thank the school´s administration for their trust in the idea of GASTHOF. For the financial support of GASTHOF, we sincerely thank Dr. Ludger Hünnekens and Georg Schwarz of the Allianz Kulturstiftung (Munich), Hedwig Fijen and Martin Fritz of the International Foundation Manifesta (Amsterdam) and Manifesta 4 (Frankfurt am Main) as well as the Hessisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst (Wiesbaden).

We would like to point out that the willingness of the students of the Städelschule to turn the school into a temporary hostel by clearing their studios and offering the private workspaces to the guests provided the infrastructure for GASTHOF. The Städelschule was fortunate to have the luxury to create a structure for hospitality; but what made GASTHOF an extraordinary experience was the presence and the enthusiasm of all participants living, eating, talking, listening, drinking, dancing, sleeping…

Living and working together at GASTHOF offered an extraordinary opportunity to all participants for a mutual exchange on art. We believe that GASTHOF represents a necessary

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With Gasthof, we undertook a kind of institutional experiment. What happens when two totally different kinds of institutions (in this case an art college and an inn) are morphed into an entirely new kind of entity? Art Academy + Hotel = ?

In a recent book about art education in Germany, one writer contends: „The art academy, that state-maintained refuge for art teachers and art students which enjoys much freedom, has long ceased being as undisputed and uncontroversial as many a Sunday sermon may suggest.“ (1) He then cites German art historian Wieland Schmied, „The academy today – and it has long been so, although not since its early beginnings – is a contradiction in itself.“ The identity of today‘s art academies is by no means easy to delimit, but this vagueness and flexibility is not only a problem. It is also an asset that this institution shares with other interesting centers of exploration, reflection, and production, such as the experimental kitchen and the laboratory. One can therefore conclude, „Art colleges have no institutional identity a priori; rather they tend to exist in a kind of institutional contradiction – and yet do draw a substantial part of their existential justification from this.“ A contemporary art college must take trans-disciplinarity seriously. To stubbornly insist on the importance of disciplines is reactionary, but to give up all awareness of historical development and of traditional artistic skills is perhaps an even more problematic. We have travelled far since Cennino Cennini gave his advice to young artists (ca 1400): Start grinding color by color. Take a porphyry slab, not too polished, half an arm long on each side. Take another porphyry stone to hold in hand, flat underneath, in the shape of a bowl, and smaller, so that the hand can grip firmly and steer it....

More than most other institutions, art colleges are always local. No matter how large and international the city, the local art academy will always display traits that one cannot find in other places. On the one hand this is something positive. Who if not the young artists studying in a city and the professors teaching them should define the local art situation? On the other hand, colleges can easily become closed microcosms without contact to the rest of the world and thus a bit too provincial. The ambition to open up a college entirely to the international art world can also lead to anonymity. An art academy is not the same thing as an international art fair. To function in an interesting way, it must stand in contact with the local culture and find its own identity in this paradoxical mix. During one week in the summer of 2002 we created a special international compound of international ingredients and local conditions. Art Academy + Hotel = Gasthof.

1) Kunst- und Musikhochschulen in Deutschland, eds. Bode/Becker/Habbich (München, London, New York: Prestel, 2001), p. 63.

// DANIEL BIRNBAUM

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A STRANGE QUESTION, PERHAPS, BUT HARDLY A SUPERFLUOUS ONE: WHAT IS AN ART ACADEMY?

Gasthof 2002 at Städelschule in Frankfurt calls to mind that art should be dedicated to permanent experiments which expand the existing forms and expressive means of social encounters. From the very onset, a decisive reinterpretation was made: Can an art university serve as an accommodation for guests from around the world? Not symbolically, in the form of discourse, or virtually, but in line with pragmatic necessities and as a real offer to the (for the most part) student guests: to stay overnight, to eat, and to meet others who were interested in coming to the city on the occasion of Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt and documenta 11 in Kassel.

The social subtext of any (good) educational institution was thus taken literally and made to its actual raison d’être. In memorable relaxedness, all participants were reminded of the consequences it can have when concepts frequently overelaborated are taken literally again for a change: The claim so often made to redefine social spheres and the orientation of current art practices towards communication both became tangible and were filled with life in an exemplary manner. Exemplary,

// MARTIN FRITZ

because no final result stood in the foreground. The focus, moreover, was on the trust in the consequential effects of numerous interactions among the participants on site – and as a further consequence: all over the world – which could by no means be organised. Or could they? Weren’t the ideal conditions for this created? These ideal conditions arose in silent complicity between the host (Städelschule) and the guests (students from 30 European countries). It was not the concept of efficiency-oriented „service” that stood in the foreground on both sides, but rather the conviction that invited guests – especially as persons eager to learn – do not constitute a mere audience that is to be impressed or to serve as an echo chamber for the lecturers or producers, but that by coming they create the preconditions for any kind of exchange in the first place.

all „formats” – eating, drinking, talking, listening – freed those involved from the dictate of presentation and thus equally prevented the basic evil of similar exhibition attempts, the bitter competition to secure scarce resources and the isolation of the actors associated with this, from arising. Everything was there in abundance: food, drink, occasions to talk and listen. Of course no event in the thin air of the international art business and its strategic orientation can remain free of expected „effects“, and Gasthof 2002 also played its role. But the social function of the host, which was taken seriously, and the open search for exchange on the side of the guests make one want an encore: Gasthof in Frankfurt was a model. Indeed, there should be more.

In retrospect, the Gasthof appears as a zone of luxury, characterised by the time that was available and possibility of the participants to become active themselves. The advantages of the younger guests – unplanned time, attention, and social competence – conveyed itself to the habitually restless professional visitors and lecturers. The reduction to, or rather: the focussing of the offers on the most social of

10/11

I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.

I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero.

I am for art that embroils itself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top.

I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent or whatever is necessary.

I am for art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.

I am for an artist who vanishes, turning up in a white cap painting signs or hallways.

I am for art that spills out of an old man´s purse when he bounces off a passing fender.

I am for the art out of a doggy´s mouth, falling five stories from the roof.

I am for art that a kid licks, after peeling away the wrapper.

I am for an art that joggles like everyones knees, when the bus traverses an excavation.

I am for art that is smoked, like a cigarette, smells, like a pair of shoes.

I am for art that flaps like a flag, or helps blow noses, like a handkerchief.

I am for art that is put on and taken off, like pants, which develops holes, like socks, which is eaten, like a piece of pie, or abandoned with great contempt, like a piece of shit.

I am for art covered with bandages, I am for art that limps and rolls and runs and jumps.

I am for art that comes in a can or washes up on the shore.

I am for art that coils and grunts like a wrestler. I am for art that sheds hair.

I am for art you can sit on.

I am for art you can pick your nose with or stub your toes on.

I am for art from a pocket, from deep channels of the ear, from the edge of a knife, from the corners of the mouth, stuck in the eye or worn on the wrist.

I am for art under the skirts, and the art of pinching cockroaches.

I am for the art of conversation between the sidewalk and a blind mans metal stick.

I am for art that grows in a pot, that comes on down out of the skies at night, like lighting, that hides in the clouds and growls.

I am for art that flipped on and off with a switch.

I am for art that unfolds like a map, that you can squeeze, like your sweety‘s arm, or kiss, like a pet dog. Which expands and squeaks, like an accordion,which you can spill your dinner on, like an old tablecloth.

I am for art that you can hammer with, stitch with, sew with, paste with, file with.

I am for art that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is.

I am for art that helps old ladies cross the street.

// RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA

I am for the art of the washing machine. I am for the art of government check. I am for the art of last wars raincoat.

I am for the art that comes up in the fogs from sewer-holes in winter. I am for the art that splits when you step on a frozen puddle.

I am for the worms art inside the apple.

I am for the art of sweat that develops between crossed legs.

I am for the art of neck-hair and cake teacups, for the art between tines of restaurant forks, for the odor of boiling dishwashers.

I am for the art of sailing on Sundays, and the art of red and white gasoline pumps.

I am for the art of bright blue factory columns and blinking biscuit signs.

I am for the art of cheap plaster and enamel.

I am for the art of worn marble and smashed slate.

I am for the art of rolling cobblestones and sliding sand.

I am for the art of slag and black coal.

I am for the art of dead birds.

I am for the scratchings in the asphalt, daubing at the walls.

I am for the art of bending and kicking metal and breaking glass, and pulling at things to make them fall down.

I am for the art of punching and skinning knees and sat-on bananas.

I am for the art of kids´smells. I am for the art of mama-babble.

I am for the art of bar-babble, tooth-picking, beerdrinking, egg-salting, in-sulting.

I am for the art of falling off the barstool.

I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs.

I am for the art of ice-cream cones dropped on concrete.

I am for the majestic art of dog-turds, rising like cathedrals.

I am for the blinking arts, lighting up the night.

I am for falling, splashing, wiggling, jumping, going on and off.

I am for the art of fat truck-tires and black eyes.

I am for Kool-art, 7-UP art, Vam art, Methol art, L&M art, Ex-Lax art, Venida art, Heaven Hill art, Pamryl art, San-o-med art, Rx art, 9.99 art, Now art, New art, How art, Fire sale art, Last Chance art, Only art, Diamond art, Tomorrow art, Franks art, Ducks art, Meat-orama art.

I am for the art of bread wet by rain. I am for the rat´s dance between floors.

I am for the art of flies walking on a slick pear in the electric light.

I am for the art of soggy onions and firm green shoots. I am for the art of clicking among the nuts when the roaches come and go.

I am for the brown sad art of rotting apples.

I am for the art of meows and clatter of cats and for the art of their dumb electric eyes.

I am for the white art of refrigerators and their muscular openings and closings.

I am for the art of rust and mold.

I am for the arthearts, funeral hearts or sweetheart hearts, full of nougat.

I am for the art of worn meathooks and singing barrels of red, white, blue and yellow meat.

I am for the art of things lost or thrown away, coming home from school.

I am for the art of cock-and-ball trees and flying cows and the noise of rectangles and squares.

I am for the art of crayons and weak grey pencil-lead, and grainy wash and sticky oil paint, and the art of windshield wipers and the art of the finger on a cold window, on dusty steel or in the bubbles on the sides of a bathtub.

I am for the art of teddy-bears and guns and decapitated rabbits, exploded umbrellas, raped beds, chairs with their brown bones broken, burning trees, firecracker ends, chicken bones, pigeon bones and boxes with men sleeping in them.

I am for the art of slightly rotten funeral flowers, hung bloody rabbits and wrinkly yellow chickens, bass drums & tambourines, and plastic phonographs.

I am for the art of abandoned boxes, tied like pharaohs.

I am for an art of watertanks and speeding clouds and flapping shades.

I am for US Government Inspected art, Grade A art, Regular Price art, Yellow Ripe art, Extra Fancy art, Ready-to-eat art, Best-for-less art, Ready-to cook art, Fully cleaned art, Spend Less art, Eat Better art, Ham art, pork art, chicken art, tomato art, banana art, apple art, turkey art, cake art, cookie art. add: I am for an art that is combed down, that is hung from each ear, that is laid on the lips and under the eyes, that is shaved from the legs, that is brushed on the teeth, that is fixed on the thighs, that is slipped on the foot. square which becomes blobby add further: I am for what Mr. Oldenburg has written fourty years ago.

12/13

I AM...

The significance of culture as an element that connects people across borders, as the reflection of an awareness of life and a seismograph of current social developments is undisputed. While political and economic decisions regarding the process of European unification are guided by interests and made rather from the outside to the inside and therefore frequently appear to be artificial, the special competence and opportunity of culture lies in grasping European integration from the inside to the outside and thus as a process of growth. „Culture” conveys the identity of a certain geographical region and thus constitutes the supporting foundations of the „European House”, which are still in a quite unclear state. International cultural projects, in particular, build bridges between nations, religions and generations; they can therefore contribute to prevent the vision of a unified Europe from becoming a castle in the air.

This assessment is part of Städelschule Frankfurt’s self-understanding, and so it seized the temporal and geographical „coincidence” of two of Europe’s most significant international art exhibitions in the summer of 2002 – the documenta in Kassel and the Manifesta in Frankfurt – as the right moment to expand the forum of its own institution, the „Gästehaus/ Guest House”, which is rich in tradition.

During the course of one week, it offered art students from all over Europe and beyond the opportunity to find a „place”, meaning an „open house” (GUEST HOUSE) in Frankfurt, which within the frame of an action packed programme enabled the students to view and study both exhibitions intensively: former university professor Peter Kubelka’s tried and tested model, established as an autonomous cooking class, which each summer presents its works in the form of a „Guest House” to

// DR. LUDGER HÜNNEKENS

the Frankfurt public, was additionally „lifted” to an international level. The project thus found a direct connection to the leitmotif of the Allianz Kulturstiftung, which since its foundation in the summer of 2000 sees its central task and purpose in the promotion of multicultural and international dialogue and in the development of new forums and mediating structures for contemporary positions in European culture.

The foundation’s primary target group consists first and foremost of young professionals, that is, disseminators from various cultural fields who represent a creative and dynamic integration process and thus prospects for Europe’s future. In this respect, the „Gasthof/Inn” forum is especially exemplary because it stands as a model for the European idea. In particular, this event enabled the interdisciplinary dialogue between graduates of European art universities and academies and various young European curators, artists and lecturers, who, within the framework of performances, discussions, workshops, etc., involved in debates on the most various themes, which are now being presented as a final and documentary result through this publication – a collection of texts, photographs and recipes. This event is thus an extraordinary model of an open platform and international think-tank on a cultural level which enhances the understanding between nations and contributes to promote talented young professionals. To then in turn integrate this model with an independent alumni network, to offer opportunities for encounters and the exchange of ideas, and to trigger a permanent cross-border process in Europe, is what the Allianz Kulturstiftung regards as one of its most important tasks.

The Allianz Kulturstiftung was dedicated to foster precisely their talent and enthusiasm within the framework of an international meeting and art-viewing project, combined with encouraging young European artists and curators to articulate a common Europe by means of art and all its different facets. The aim was to initiate a dialogue, the flow of communication among all participants, highlighting direct, individual realities and making comprehensible how different people can find a common approach to different kinds of positions and points of view in contemporary art.

The Allianz Kulturstiftung was therefore delighted to contribute to making this extraordinary project possible. If the project could make a contribution to the European dialogue and to cultural understanding and simultaneously to the further unification of Europe in such an impressive way in the future as well, this would be a great success which could serve as a model and which we expressively wish to be the case for all the young artists, curators and people working in the creative field!

We cordially thank all participants, the artists and lecturers, and especially Prof. Daniel Birnbaum, Mr. Dirk Fleischmann and Mr. Jochen Volz, without whose intensive commitment as chief organisers and co-ordinators the entire project „Gasthof/Inn” could not have been realised.

Particularly in a time when intolerance and ignorance is showing itself in numerous processes which influence opinion, the more than 200 artists from numerous countries participating in the project „Gasthof / Inn” again made us aware of the diverse and many profiles and positions European culture has to offer.

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THE ALLIANZ KULTURSTIFTUNG IN PARTNERSHIP WITH GASTHOF 2002

The archaeology of the word art as understood within the Western system is an extensive subject. But look how dramatically we are leaving that system! Unless we are alert to the transformation of the concept and what we understand as „visual art”, we shall not be able to grasp changes even within what is still conventionally referred to as visual art.

There is much activity in India, China, Africa that is radically interdisciplinary. It deterritorializes received concepts of art. Groups working on the internet or with film, video, performance, and other practices are involved in modes of knowledge production that often have oblique relations to the visual. They amount to spasmodic events that are rather different from what passes as visual art in the museum-gallery system.

Are such practices more like research machines through which social, political, visual, statistical, epidemiological data are telescoped? These are visual-intellectual evolutions that cannot be reduced to constructions of the art system. What we call art activity is expanding, extending, transmogrifying in the global contemporary setting. Hence also my dogged interest in Duchamp’s question „How to make a work of art that isn’t a work of Art?”. For me , it’s a marker for ways we might be able to engage with works, events, spasms, ructions that don’t look like art and don’t count as art, but are somehow electric, energy nodes, attractors, transmitters, conductors of new thinking, new subjectivity and action that visual artwork in the traditional sense is not able to articulate.

// SARAT MAHARAJ (EXCERPT FROM A CONVERSATION WITH DANIEL BIRNBAUM, ARTFORUM 2002)

18/19

ARRIVAL /ACCOMMODATION & STICKERS by Dani Gal Welcome reception FOOD FRANKFURT DINNER prepared by Thomas Bayrle, Kerstin Cmelka, Pili Madariaga, Giovanna Sarti, Sebastian Stöhrer and Christian Zickler Städelschule / Mensa FILM ICH ALS KOCH film by Thomas Bayrle Städelschule / Mensa OPENING of PORTFOLIO, a project by Ben Jourdan, Lisa Jugert, Anna K. Otto: A collection of documentation on the work of all participating art students Städelschule / Aula PERFORMANCE RESEARCH NO. 7 with Sofia Greff and Yasna Schindler Städelschule / main hall

JULY 24 // WEDNESDAY

// PROJECT BY SASCHA POHLE

22/23

// COLLECTIVE PROJECT BY TARJE GULLAKSEN, MIA ROSACO, DANH VO, DANIEL SALOMON // COPENHAGEN

FOOD

FOOD

FRANKFURT BREAKFAST prepared by Heike Belzer, Anja Cooymans, Heide Deigert, Claudia Gaida, Karin Hartung, and Steffi Kettel Städelschule / Mensa

Start of MAU – a bar project by Charles Esche with special appearance of Linnea Jacobsen offering local danish ‚snaps‘ with tastes from the westcoast of Jutland and singing songs Städelschule / Mensa

ART ART Walk through MANIFESTA 4 GASTHOF SOUNDTRACK live broadcast at radioX on 101,4 fm or via www.radiox.de/live/index.html

Preview of exhibition with Michael Pfrommer, Mandla Reuter and Alexander Wolff Rraum02, Darmstädter Landstrasse 10 CLUB

PANEL BEING A GUEST / PARTICIPATION & INTEGRATION Panel with John M. Armleder, Iara Boubnova, Jay Chung, Dobrila Denegri, Charles Esche, Ronald Jones and Laurie Makela Trespassing Space/Frankensteiner Hof Grosse Rittergasse 103 ~ 2rmpm KOHL CONSUME a roving bar moving at 2 river meters per minute on the south bank of the river between Holbeinsteg and Flößerbrücke along the main FOOD HANG DONG DINNER prepared by Kristina Lenard, Tho Prachaya Phinthong and Rirkrit Tiravanija Städelschule / Mensa

JULY 25 // THURSDAY

VON HINTEN DURCH DIE BRUST INS AUGE „Musikvortrag 1981-83 – was wirklich war” with Tobias Rehberger & Christian Zickler Robert Johnson, Nordring 131, Offenbach

Psychoanalysts have a common affinity for low-key jokes ending with a void. Like the one about the man with the banana in the ear, who when being reminded for the twohundredth time takes it out, with a simple: „I am sorry I didn’t hear you, cause I had a banana in my ear.” which for the psychoanalyst equals how the client has to come to terms with his/her symptom. Or the one with the man travelling with a lion trap, answering to the question, „But there are not lions around here?”, „No, there you go…”, which generally refers to hysteria, where the lion trap functions as a stand in for a cracked symbolic order.

Hitchcock used this negative, where the punch line consists of that which is not said, and where the reading appears as a ‘not not’. In other words, I am laughing because the mystery wished for is only and already that which is visible, I am laughing at my own inability to accept that the joke is nothing more than, so to say: it’s all in your head.

A so-called MacGuffin (the terminology used in relation to Hitchcock) is an empty instigator that offers representational recognition without content. The sign has become surface, similar to Warhol’s expression, „What you don’t see, doesn’t exist!”, but it is precisely this emptiness that presents possibility to travel along the media itself, and there through to create awareness of the conventions directing our experiences. „Gasthof”, proposes: This is Gasthof. In doing so it provokes the spectator, with or against his/her will, to take part of the ‘making do’. When the spectator answers yes, then he or she is already, and consciously, the initiator of a text, but it is a text without actors. The spectator that answers yes, in other words, is similar to the man that just took a banana out of his ear, allowing for him/her self to approach the symptom. And at the same time the man in the train, but this time not saying „There you go…”, but „Well, then this is no lion trap”. „Gasthof” was a real MacGuffin where the instigator’s only purpose was to engage the sign in a snowball-effect, an empty effect that necessarily ends in an awareness of the arbitrary quality of the sign. It was in this, to return to Hitchcock, that Gasthof proposed a „shock of the expected”. It didn’t do nothing but kept on going, and it was in this ‘knowing’, similar to the shower seen in „Psycho”, where „Gasthof” finally was a matter of ethics.

Inaccessible as anything, „Gasthof’s” utterance came to pass as a universal-singular, particular to, but unlimited by the content of the situation in which it comes to exist. „Gasthof” came into being through a resilient fidelity to the consequences of the event.

An event that accords no general principle, for the simple reason that what is universal is always rooted in the particular, where ethics is this absolute emptiness, and where truth is the fidelity to ones own indifference. In „Gasthof” the truth was a MacGuffin, and empty instigator stubbornly persisting, as a sentence from Beckett: „I can’t go on, I will go on”

// STÉPHANIE MOISDON TREMBLEY

30/31

I CAN’T GO ON, I WILL GO ON

In Spike Jonze’s film „Being John Malkovich” the very Malkovich, himself, is offered to look out through his own eyes. To be inside himself as another, checking out not the world but strategies of representation utilised by Malkovich, i.e. himself.

The idea for this scene is not particularly new, in its oscillation between Levis Carroll’s dream-scapes and a Cartesian ergo sum and back again. What is striking is Jonze’s solution to what Mr Malkovich will experience. Perhaps a uncoloured nothingness that can not be represented. The Lacanian real illustrated to its bluntest degree, or could it be some weird – do we dare to say surreal – world where clocks melt, mountains turn into watercolour tornados and all of a suddenly Malkovitch’s uncle (performed by Robin Williams) turn up behind a tree smilingly saying: „This is also you, John. You have to let go to be able to fly”, or some other totally pathetic sentence.

No, Spike Jonze simply lets Malkovitch experience an endless flow of Malkovich.

Everybody looks like Malkovitch. No everybody is Malkovich in an incessant succession of perfect simulacra. All everybody says is him, all everybody looks at, all everybody listens to, all everybody everybody is, in short, „Malkovich Malkovich!” or „Malkovitch?

Malkovitch”. There’s nothing more to it. Sorry, but „Malkovitch”, including some slight shifts in melody and one or other exclamation mark: „Malkovitch?”

What happens to the character in the film is not the experience of a real beyond language, nor what is disguised in his unconscious, but a collapse of the signifier, into an unconditional floating. Where we normally can, allow or simply fool ourselves into accepting the this as the this and the that as the that in the equations between signifier and signified, perception and representation, past, presence and future, what Malkovitch experiences is the very equation it self, unsolved.

Same story but a little less clever in the recent Kylie video „Come In To My World”, but here the subject gets swept away as an envelop slipping out of your bag.

In the scene with „John Malkovich” as during „Gasthof”, always announced as disappearance (there’s nothing inside, like as song by The Blur), the spectator experiences a shift away from expression, narrative and analysis in respect of form and content, to a discursive operation. What „Gasthof” proposes is, simply: „This is Gasthof!” „Gasthof” is not about this or that, it is Gasthof, in the sense that it unfolds event as discourse. „Gasthof”, however, takes it beyond representing ‘a’ discourse, and the focus of its investment is instead on the ideology, in which the spectator engages in the process of unfolding. „Gasthof” thus is not about this or that but about aboutness. As a family picture is not about the family but about its aboutness.

Conceptually „Gasthof Gasthof…” becomes a critical posture in respect of ontologies of the event. What is presence? What is historicity? What is the gesture? But more important it is „Gasthof Gasthof…” as crossed out/over: „Gasthof” – where the figure signifies event as concept, and designates experience/comprehension as difference.

// STÉPHANIE MOISDON TREMBLEY

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THIS IS GASTHOF!

For me Gasthof was more than just an event. It was, I would say, an experience that was all the more active because it came after the intense work on Manifesta 4 and the Cetinje Biennial. I was in the role of a guest and could enjoy without feeling guilty for when things did not go the way they should. So much so, that I was not even aware if things were not going as they should in the Gasthof. That’s such a nice relief…

It’s obvious that when working on a show the period right before the opening is more related with the works themselves rather then to the artists, with dense process of decision making and taking responsibilities with great speed but sometimes for an extended period of time. The most pleasant aspect of the Gasthof for me was that I could communicate with people/artists and look at works too with pure professional pleasure not related to concrete tasks, just like in a game. I was related to Gasthof in such a way that I wasn’t related with any responsibility so I took great pleasure in realizing that cooking and eating are the most democratic, communicative, open and comfortable things that do not need any special contextualization or translation. Eating is such an archetypal common activity. It could be stylish and stylized, minimalistic and lavish, massive and cozy, and there are so many other possibilities. The best thing however is that the ones that are cooking for the others and then eat with them are usually in such great mood and disperse positive emotions and energy. The food related part of Gasthof with the mixed culinary adventures, the modified and supplemented recipes re-confirmed for me the incredible creative potential of cooking. The ironic performance of John Armleder and his students for instance, made such a strong impression on me that even the not so sophisticated food couldn’t eclipse.

I consider the use of that eternal experience that the most interesting discussions take place behind the scenes and not at all during the time and on the „stage allocated for them”, as the most valuable achievement of Gasthof. That’s because the moments „on stage” were somehow not so mandatory but were just happening. Although there was a program, still discussions were in a flux. Digestion of food went along with digestion of rather serious themes and speakers that, under different circumstances in the same heat on the benches of river Main would have triggered the students’ nihilism and skepticism.

I regret the fact that the panel discussion and presentation of Manifesta 4 during the Gasthof happened so hastily and shortly, and in opposition to the whole spirit of the Gasthof because we had speakers and audience divided… Yet there were a lot of questions to which I and Stéphanie tried to answer with a glass of wine and a plastic plate full of food in hand in the Staedel School garden…

My final impression is that „Food makes debate-full”, especially if one is young and/or open; a student and/or a teacher; hand-to-mouth and/or tongue-in-cheek; and some even say that „eating is the best revenge”… Gasthof 2002 in the hot Frankfurt summer will stay in my memory as the best „picnic in culture” that I have ever had.

// IARA BOUBNOVA

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PICNIC IN CULTURE

For Gasthof 2002, the Armleder Class of the HBK Braunschweig, school of art, started working early Summer on the musical performance project, Microwave Music, created specially for the event.

The piece basically consists of a life electronic composition based on heating deep-frozen meals with an orchestra of twelve microwave-ovens attached with suction-cap microphones and a conductor unsealing the packaged dishes with a pair of scissors connected to a microphone as well.

The Armleder Class Team cooked several hundred meals of various types live in its studio during the Rundgang at the HBK Braunschweig, as an Ouverture Program and then had the whole set of dishes delivered to Frankfurt by a refrigerator truck for Gasthof 2002. The actual performance then took place, when the meals were served during three hours under the electronic amplified sounds that make the Microwave Music.

This first performance was recorded and will be released as a record issued in the 404 Series by the Villa Magica Records Label in 2003. Gasthof 2002 turned out to be the most enjoyable and perfect venue for the concert!

// JOHN ARMLEDER

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MICROWAVE MUSIC

This text, although brief, is what I consider a self-critical approach towards the event entitled Gasthof, which the School Maumaus co-organized together with a range of Institutions during the summer of 2002.

Gasthof targeted mostly art schools, based on contacts the Städelschule had established world-wide over recent years. The idea was to gather in Frankfurt am Main about 250 students, who, in the framework of the two major exhibitions in the region, Documenta 11 and Manifesta 4, would come together, visit the exhibitions, and participate in a weekend colloquium – which took place in an appropriated circus tent on the banks of the river Main.

For the Maumaus School the project was a unique chance for 15 students – nearly half the total students of the school – to span the gap of almost 3000 km and to experience first-hand the two most discussed art events in central Europe. This was possible due to Gasthof’s low-budget bed and breakfast, in particular through the generous offer of the main organizer‘s infrastructure, the Städelschule, which took the exceptional step of converting its studios into dormitories. We were also seeking encounter and debate with an international art school – and consequently with an art student scene, rare in such a peripheral country like Portugal, allowing teachers

// JÜRGEN BOCK

and students to put into perspective their own actions, in both art practice and art theory.

Gasthof turned out as plural as an event like this can be. Besides the numerous contacts the students were able to establish, and which are impossible to assess in terms or figures, the plurality of different approaches towards art and art education became visible mostly through a panel entitled Utopian Academy with representatives of the different groups (teachers, art theorist, sponsors, artists and curators, including myself). Unfortunately, the students did not do much of the talking and, looking back, I would say that they should have been on the panel instead of us, in order to gain their intellectual emancipation regarding assessment of the art education system.

It is they who benefit, or suffer, with systems, which appear to them as structures that are taken for granted and, for a wide range of factual reasons, difficult to change. Again with hindsight, the application of the term Utopian turned out counterproductive. It evoked the glories of the myths of modern art, clichés like originality, genuineness or avant-garde. But instead of leading to a pragmatic analysis of the current functioning of art school systems and the history behind their functioning, including methodologies for creating significance in the art education field, the application of the term Utopia became, in my opinion, suspiciously resembling a convenient alibi for the defenders of current systems. As in the definition one can find in the dictionary, Utopia stands for projects impossible to achieve, far

out of our range and in this sense liable to become politically irrelevant regarding possible changes in the system.

I would like to recall John Miller’s text entitled „The Pedagogical Model: To Make Shame More Shameful Still by Making It Public“, published in Texte zur Kunst (No. 18) in 1995.

Miller pointed out, „that the [art] student must first in effect accept and internalize, critically or not, the systemic paradigm of the political economy – and much of this occurs through the figure of the teacher.“ I believe that it is clear that we, the teachers, find ourselves in the middle of a conflict of interests, when we, instead of the students, propose or, in a paternalistic way, encourage thoughts of change in the art education system. In my opinion, the Utopian Academy discussion became a metaphor for what Miller called „the failure to self-reflexively interrogate the [our] bad consciousness of the pedagogy itself and in the idealist assumption that one might occupy a cultural niche free from the spectre of bad consciousness.“ The question is whether we, as teachers and students, want to deal with this unwelcome knowledge or whether we prefer to believe that the best artists anyway never attended what might be considered today a good art school.

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UTOPIAN ACADEMY AS A MODERNIST MYTH

FOOD

FOOD

WATERLOO BREAKFAST prepared Marla Botterill and Michael Murphy Städelschule / Mensa

LISBON DINNER prepared by Ana Roque, Alex Campos, Pedro Cardoso, Luís Colaço, Mário Pires Cordeiro, Célia Domingues, Ramiro Guerreiro, Pedro Lagoa, Sérgio Leitão, Tiago Guedes Madeira, Angel Masip, Chiara Picotto, Ana Sofia Ponte, Mariana Correia Ramos, Marta Maria Rocha Burnay, Vanessa Santos Ranha, Fernando Ibero Rosenheim, Rodrigo Santos, Inês Sénica, Teresa Nobre Silva de Aguiar, Maria Teresa Silva, Daniela Silvestre, Rui Tiago and Soraya Vascon Städelschule / Mensa

PANEL THE GASTHOF CHECK-OUT moderated by Protoacademy Every participant is describing her-/ himself within one minute Tent FOOD MOSCOW SOUP prepared by Alexandere Gourko, Maxim Ilioukhine, Eldar Karkhalev, Konstantinova Lioudmila, Andrei Oustinov, Georgi Pervov, Natalia Struchkova and Natilia Zyablova on the riverside near the tent PANEL MONSTERS OF VERACITY an interview with Sarat Maharaj

by Daniel Birnbaum Tent

ART GARTENSTRASSE 47 preview of exhibition with Jessika Ferriol, Sooyean Kim, Helene Arendt, Ole Classen SPACE HEALING project by Katja Majer Städelschule / studio MUSIC JRGWFRNZCS in concert BEAUTIES OF THA NIGHT in concert Tent

FOTO ART OFFICIAL GROUP PHOTOGRAPH of all participants and visitors of GASTHOF 2002 made by Miriam Bäckström and Carsten Höller in front of the tent on the main

JULY 26 // FRIDAY

THE BANQUET OF MERCILESS REGRET project by Ronald Jones and Laurie Makela (by invitation only!)

Städelschule

The first and magnificent meeting of young artists and students of European art academies „Real Presence – Generation 2001“, was organised as a big movement of the youth... movement of the emerging generations in the new century... movement of the free communications, gatherings and contacts between young persons, countries, religions and cities.

Short pre-history of this meeting started in the middle of the ‚90s, when I asked prof. Kasper Koenig, than Dean of Frankfurt‘s Städelschule, to show in Belgrade works of some of the students and invite some of these young artists to come. So in those hard and politically specific times we had first guests from Frankfurt, from the Thomas Bayrle class, and this encounter remained really unforgettable.

By the end of the ‚90s we had some more guests from the Düsseldorf academy, from classes of Klaus Rinke and Jannis Kounellis, and students of Michelangelo Pistoletto from Vienna academy, some groups of students from Brera in Milan, and in 1999, just before the bombing, also the students from Holland, from the Enschede academy - AKI 2.

In the same year I stopped working as the curator of the Visual Art program of Students Cultural Centre, and after the invitation of Barbara Hammann, I started working and travelling as a guest professor. This friendly and

professional invitation from Kunsthochschule Kassel gave me a chance later to get to know a great number of European art academies in the period of two years, and also, thanks to some other friends, to meet many young artists and students. This was a very important period.

I understood that on this visits I got to know great generations of young people, very interesting, various and open, and at the same time, very close and dear, and I could say, with same generational characteristics as young people that I knew from my Balkan surroundings. During some of my visits we started to talk with some of the artists about the possibilities to organise a huge encounter of young artists and students, and the following democratic changes that occurred in Belgrade made it possible to organise a first meeting right there.

It was really incredible and fantastic to see hundreds of young persons from Europe and from all over the world in Belgrade, and in a country that is still closed and without possibilities of free communication and movement.

Just as Thomas Zipp and Phillip Zaiser noticed in the middle of the ‚90s that Belgrade was the Las Vegas of Europe, this new generation of the artists’ participants of „Real Presence“, called it a new Woodstock.

almost impossible: the academy became a space to stay, to establish friendships, follow the programs, cook and prepare food, or to listen to music. So emerged a new space populated by young people, and in the garden and in the back yard appeared different works, installations, and meeting places for individuals and schools. This free reaction and inventiveness of young artists to create specific urban space – „a city of Gasthof“, made in a way that in Belgrade, in the occasion of „Real Presence 2 - Flashback GASTHOF“ we suggested to the artists participants to build/ form within the space of the Museum 25th of May their own work place, to urbanise the space and in this way create new configurations of their presentations. And really all presentations were very interesting, provocative and involving.

In the end I would like to mention also two other smaller meetings, that happened in a similar way, in Kassel and in Sicily, and this extension of the idea of the artists/students meeting proofs the necessity of young people to create wider contacts, exchange and new artistic scene.

„GASTHOF“ in Frankfurt, in the organisation of Städelschule and Portikus, together with other organisational structures did something

// BILJANA TOMIC

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REAL PRESENCE 2 – FLASHBACK GASTHOF 2002

Plateau 2001 in Belgrade All started on the roof of the ex Tito’s Museum on a beautiful sunny morning of late August 2001.

It wasn’t really planed to be so... the idea came to Biljana quite spontaneously the day before, watching the photo of the Museum 25th of May, saying „look, this roof is so flat... it is just as a plateau... Let’s make really a plateau of humankind!”

It was a symbolical gesture, a thanks to Harald Szeemann who inaugurated „Real Presence” with a lecture and homage to the idea of „Plateau of Humankind” in Venice as reflection of contemporary world on the beginning of twenty-first century, but also as an exhibition that announced the spirit of change for new times to come.

At the same time it was a first encounter of a great number of young artists and art students from all over the world. A moment of affirming their „real presence” in Belgrade. For all of us it was a moment for getting holds of the given space, of the empty ex Tito’s Museum as a place to be „inhabited”, lived and transformed in the next fifteen days. A moment of making some snapshots and realising a collective action... a first of many which will follow during the workshop and our staying together in Belgrade.

This collective action actually underlined some basic ideas which were behind the Real Presence project: gathering of young artists, breaking with isolation and bridging the gap of the last ten years of war and crisis in Yugoslavia. Just as the title Real Presence – Generation 2001 indicates, this project was about creating a chance for emerging generations of artists from different cultural backgrounds

// DOBRILA DENEGRI

to get to know each other through direct contact, communication and work. Most of all, it was about being really present in Belgrade: about coming, crossing the borders and facing directly reality of the place that was subject of millions of newspaper headlines and TV specials, shocking and fluid electronic images...

It was about meeting people and hearing different voices... and about directness and immediacy in this times of political strategies and relationships that are becoming more and more virtual.

Real Presence was done with a spirit of complete openness in terms of selection, theme, media, any kind of expression... and as an attempt to announce a new beginning through the energy, enthusiasm, ideas and attitudes of creative young people.

Two weeks of the workshop with about three hundred young artists and art students were filled with events, actions, performances, exhibitions in different spaces of the city… and on the last evening of the quite dynamic opening of the show that would last only one day in the Museum 25th of May, talking with Dirk about all this experience, or maybe better to say, this intense adventure, we thought that it would be great to continue with development and transformation of this kind of projects…

Link to Gasthof So the summer 2002 became the next appointment in Frankfurt with a fantastic gathering at Gasthof, which also provided us with some of the main thematic guidelines for the second edition of Real Presence in Belgrade. Gasthof’s focus on notions of hospitality, communication, food and music, and more precisely Arend Roelnik’s installation „Off Gasthof” gave a basic imprint to the RP2: a workshop in which the young artists and art students were asked to construct, build, compose „communicative spaces”.

So again the ex-Tito’s museum became, in

a quite spontaneous way, a space transformed through a sort of „creative” marathon of 48 hours, in a sort of net of production and communication sites, such as: „picnic” installation of the „Un-Weather” group from Berlin, „stadium” installation by Arend Roelnik (Holland), sleeping, meditation and memory rooms by Belgrade and Milan artists, „beauty salon” by artists from Novi Sad, „meadow” by an Icelandic group or „mappings” by the artists from Singapore… For a few days the museum was functioning as a „production site”. And this basically underlined the main idea, or maybe just a feeling, of freedom and constructiveness. More than installations and works to be seen, all this spaces were „lived” and animated by the collaborations and communication between young artists, and later also between artists coming from different parts of the world and the Belgrade public.

The second part of the program of RP2 workshop was even more closely linked to Gasthof.

It actually presented through videos and photos subjective visions, records, impressions or documents by some of the artists/students – participants of Frankfurt’s event. A week of Belgrade’s workshop ended with the „Flashback Gasthof” video screening that collected and presented some of the short films edited specially for this occasion. They reminded us on some of the Gasthof’s „flavours”: colourful square Austria, Lisbon’s „saudade”, French and Italian activism or Slovenian „pop” and many more. Beside contributions on video we had a great number of photo documents that became a set of „Gasthof” postcards, to be spread, just as the idea of this kind of projects and gatherings that aims on communication, collaboration, friendship and fun should be spread all around the world.

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REAL PRESENCE – GENERATION 2001 / GASTHOF / REAL PRESENCE & FLASHBACK GASTHOF 2002

The history of art academies and of art education is still a field in which very little research has been done. In a certain sense, however, one could say that there are two possible separating lines. What is examined on the one side is the struggle of academic educational approaches and of attempts to adopt the inventiveness of contemporary artists in new forms of art universities. Even today, art universities with neo-academic approaches are often only a few dozen kilometres away from art academies that focus on inventiveness in the visual field in terms of the way they are organised and their educational ideas. No different than in the second half of the 19th century – the first multinational heyday of advanced training of artists in public institutions – art universities with neo-academic approaches today often unite excellent, internationally successful protagonists in their teaching staff. What distinguishes them from non-academic schools is the fundamental approach of the art university’s orientation.

What we call „academic” here in shorthand is based, today as well as in the second half of the 19th century, on the pedagogical principle aimed at teaching the students the „tools of the trade”, teaching them the „lasting formal principles” and conveying to them the „respect for the archetypal artistic laws”. This may appear as a caricature, but it can be heard in many professor’s offices from noted contemporary artists. On the other side there are those contemporary art universities that place art’s critical, independent and innovative position in post-industrial society at the centre of their pedagogical approach. The border between the two types of institutions is not always clearly discernible for an outsider.

In institutional everyday life and in the artistic results, however, these two camps are diametrically opposed.

// ROBERT FLECK

The other separating line for artists since the introduction of public education in this field is between communities of choice and large social institutions. „Gasthof” at the Städelschule succeeded in making this clear, something which only very few events in the recent history of art universities have been capable of. „Gasthof” meant that suddenly inside a large social institution an informal gathering took place, which within just a few days developed into a community of choice with common basic convictions in regard to the free nature of art. The meeting was totally undogmatic, in the very best sense without a programme and lacking content. It was fortunately neither a symposium with a predetermined programme, nor a congress.

One suddenly encountered several hundred art students from innumerable countries who simply discovered the concept of freedom for themselves. This expression may sound „Beuysian”, but it indeed corresponds with what actually took place at the „Gasthof”.

Like only seldom in the past years, one had the feeling that there is a huge potential for free institutions, communities of choice, and creative fields in the area of art universities.

It is most likely no coincidence that a large number of colleagues working in the field of exhibitions, museums and art critique have at least temporarily switched to the field of art academies in recent years.

The dialectics between communities of choice and large social institutions also apply to the history of the Städelschule (which Hubert Sal-den examined in really pioneering work contributing to the history of art academies).

The „Gasthof” at Städelschule is not without historical predecessors. In the 1920s, the Städelschule made the politically delicate decision to take in all the „Bauhaus” protagonists chased away from Weimar by the National Socialist town council majority. Max Beckmann thus became a painting professor at

the Städelschule. When in 1933 the National Socialists took over power in all of Germany, this engagement was stopped by an institutional framework. Beckmann was dismissed along with others.

Already half a century earlier, the Städelschule was a temporary safe haven for a modern artist and teacher exposed to hostility. As the only creative artist, Gustave Courbet had stood up to the dictatorship of Napolean III. in France. Art students came to his studio in 1862 and asked him to give them advice in the work space they had jointly rented next to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Courbet did so free of change for one and a half years. The increasing number of students who attended his lessons led to an existential crisis of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and triggered its reform (conducted by Prosper Mérimée and Viollet-le-Duc and commissioned by Napoleon III). But it also forced Courbet to go into exile for the first time. The Städelschule subsequently helped Courbet survive financially and in terms of his reputation. Courbet’s work in Frankfurt, in turn, had a triggering influence on German Impressionism and Expressionism.

The temporary „free Courbet school” in Paris was again the model for innumerable independent art schools, which – from Matisse, André Lhote, Léger, and the Bauhaus up to the free spaces of the present – make up the other side of the history of art universities since the 19th century

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GASTHOF

If I offered you the intimacy of my thoughts, of my current perceptions of research, acute, disjointed, conjectural, a-conclusive and product-less, would you regard this offer as empty of concrete material? Would you rather wait for another proposition without risk and laden with clarity, just another demand for what you do anyway, a recognition of what you already know you can do and can execute without fail? Self-reproducing and chronic, does the state of your production rely on this assurance? How often are you offered the close intimacy of potential failure? Not failure as some built-in conceit, but the possibility that what I suggest as a point of departure will lead you nowhere that you can recognise in the first instance.

Conceptual intimacy. Sometimes announced, sometimes sensed, sometimes vehicled through vectors of art, rare in any case. Sometimes confused with events or relationships that can override the intentions of reaching the intimacy of concepts. Sometimes too latent to be drawn upon and recognised. Sometimes built into fearfulness, the fear of ridicule in the act of withdrawal, and that clumsiness of disengagement. Sometimes not even requested or highlighted as that specific contact that punctuates apparently aimless communication.

They say that today everything must be visible to be apprehended as art. There is neither underground nor cell of resistance because when lights are on permanently even the nocturnal mythic falls prey to the potency of illumination. This art that is visible and informative in its desire to communicate social conditions, advancing without respite, search-enginelike, this art is never intimate. To be intimate it would have to accept not just the darkness of unknown and disparate propositions, but clothe this readiness in forms that cannot be seen, accentuated, and made into the art we know today, that of heightened communication but little contact. Idealism? Obscurantism?

A return to the cryptological requirements of intimate contact? Do you read in these words an anachronistic flashback to the early avant-

// CLÉMENTINE DELISS

garde of our mutual modernities? Is this some craving for a lost challenge, the clandestine and encoded art production that confronts rather than consoles society, that addresses the role of the artist as aesthetic disrupter, closet revolutionary, sentient and subversive at once?

Conceptual intimacy could be a counter-pole to communicational abstinence, the increasingly a-democratic resistance to global exchange. It would make strategies of conscious withdrawal emerge within a new context, not so much opened out and disclosed, but sensed as increasing depth, that depth of unforeseeable yet humble concerns to generate meanings through shared experiences.

Are you experienced? Are experiences the stasis of repetition, the accretion of the same, and the resort of the formulaic? Or are we talking about the experienced, of elements that together as fluid sediment, constitute and identify an on-going willingness to experience? I am experienced = I am ready to exchange that question, to begin entering the accumulation of incommensurable experiences, where knowledge is a resource and reservoir to be pooled with you.

presentiment of potential intimacy? For if we believe gatherings are in themselves sufficient to act out aesthetic propositions, then we are clearly fooling ourselves. Today the punctuation that makes sense of social syntax, that like an x-ray accentuates the silences, gestures, and intimate transfers of new meanings, is located in the latency of impending solutions either side of that which we can see. Gasthof remains a symptom of excessive visibility, engineered to fit, and celebrated in the instance in which it takes place. So how can we develop new formats to translate the postconvivial condition, and if so, is this collection of essays the solution?

One year later, the apparent absence of a focus that nonetheless brought over two hundred young artists and students to Frankfurt, appears nearly unimaginable. Such critique is not directed at the Gasthof per se, nor the dynamism and energies of its organisers, but at our own capacity to remain endogamous to our own discourse, to let go of meaning for the wrong reasons, and to lose the vigilance of interpersonal and ideational risk. Do we need a crisis to bring conceptual intimacy into play? Hopefully not.

Does conviviality lead to intimacy? If Gasthof was a gathering founded on the assumption of the social, did it manage to go beyond the generic practice of hospitality and question the conditions of contact today? Was it able to animate and risk mutual disclosures?

The formalisms of conviviality, those choreographies of eating and drinking together for which Gasthof was a prime success may not be enough anymore. That which takes conviviality beyond the spectacular is perhaps the continuity that is structured as a modular component within the event, both before it begins and once it has taken place. Why make a fuss about the moment of hospitality as if it were the centre of the focus?

Maybe it’s the invitation, how it is conceived, produced, disseminated, and apprehended that counts. Do you travel far to invite someone to participate in an act of conviviality? Is that act contained in the process of inviting that person? Or is the continuity that makes of conviviality an act of engagement beyond the moment of sheer presence, is it to be found in the notion of the aftermath? And that aftermath, does it not play precisely on the

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THE SEARCH FOR CONCEPTUAL INTIMACY

FOOD

PANEL

PÄRNU BREAKFAST prepared by Peeter Allik, Toomas Kuusing, Olle Meyer, Al Paldrok, Christin Peets, Meeland Sepp, Tanel Saar, Taje Tross Städelschule / Mensa

UTOPIA? Moderated by Florence Derieux with Carsten Höller, Stéphanie Moisdon Trembley, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Philippe Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija Tent

ART

FAREWELL RECEPTION FOR PETER COOK with Yaele Reisner, Colin Fournier, Dennis Crompton, Benedetta Tagliabue, Klaus Bollinger, Schneider und Schumacher, INDEX (Sigrun Musa / Uli Exner), Götz Stöckmann / Gabi Seifert Tent

Nongrata presentation of photography at PORTFOLIO Städelschule / Aula BOOK RELEASE of Real Presence 2001, Belgrade by Dobrila Denegri & Biljana Tomic Tent WORKSHOP REBELS REVISITED presented by Parcel with Jacob Dahl Jürgensen and Simon Dybbroe Møller. Guests: Peter Jansen (McEnroeexpert), Peter Klös (anthropologist), Mårten Spångberg (theatre-maker) Staedelschule / Aula OPEN HOUSE Public event – all participants of GASTHOF present themselves with cooking activities, music, etc.

ART LIGHTER THAN AIR presents „Meeting Space” project.

A presentation by Tomas Saraceno Tent

FILM FILMSCREENING with Martha Colburn, presenting „Music Film Dementia“ animated films by Martha Colburn and music films from the 1940´s – 60´s Städelschule / Aula FILMSCREENING with Gerhard Geiger, presenting Robert Frank „Pull my Daisy“, 27‘ Bernhard Schreiner „Hochberg“, 6‘ Gerhard Geiger „Palatca, Frühling 1997“, 23‘ Thomas Draschan „Metropolen des Leichtsinns“ 12‘ Städelschule / Aula MUSIC EN ILOSTA ITKE, EN SURUSTA ITKE, JOS ITKEN ITKENMUUTEN VAAN (I don‘t cry of joy, I don‘t cry of sorrow, if I cry I cry without a cause) a karaoke project on finnishness by Carl Lindberg and Tuulia Susiaho Tent

FOOD CLUB 1004 – FROZEN MICROWAVEMUSIC Braunschweig Städelschule / main hall

JULY 27 // SATURDAY

PARTY at Lola Montez with special appearance of Martha Colburn, presenting „Scratchy Sounds“, pop music from Europe of the 40´s to the 60´s Lola Montez, Am Städelshof 6, backyard

1. Alien brothers?

In the first joint exhibition of A.R. Penck and Jörg Immendorff, which took place in 1977 at Galerie Werner, the peculiar character of their „alliance” was already discernible. The practices exhibited there seemed, at least at first sight, to have little to do with each other.

Immendorff’s tightly filled scenic pictures, which worked like speech acts, especially since they contained political slogans like „No nuclear power plant in Brokdorf,” were placed next to Penck’s comparatively silent abstractions, where black color-zones were harshly placed in the painting, reminiscent of another painter one would not necessarily think of in this context - the abstract expressionist Clifford Still. Rather appropriately, Immendorff once called these paintings by Penck „black brush punches on a gray background.” (1) This phrase reflects the dull, yet aggressive atmosphere which the paintings exude. A dialogue, which the title of the exhibition suggested - „Immendorff mal Penck, Penck mal Immendorff” did not seem to take place here. These pictures only communicated with each other insofar as they constitute the far extremes of a painterly convention. Of course, in this respect one could claim that they were reacting to each other. However, if this hypothesis were true, more would have to happen BETWEEN the paintings. At least on the photographs of the exhibition, it looks as if there had been no sparks between them - in the final analysis, each painting remains on its own. Of course, the exhibition can be interpreted as a - perhaps unconscious - attempt at mutual completion. With his splashed canvasses, Penck made available a kind of resonant space available in which Immendorff’s narrative layers, uncontainable by frames, could better develop. It is difficult to tell whether such effects were intended or unplanned.

However, it would be a stretch o describe them as the result of „collective work.” The „collective” which Penck and Immendorff promised to form in a joint declaration must not be confused with „group work.” Rather, it was defined by oppositions: „We want to become a good collective. A collective that includes oppositions.” It is interesting in this context that Immendorff and Penck do not speak of „differences” but of „oppositions.”

Later, they also mention „confrontation.” This vocabulary is usually used for international rather than personal relations. In fact, their „personal” encounters were overshadowed

// ISABELLE GRAW

by an antagonism which gave these meetings a political character. After all, Penck was a GDR citizen, and Immendorff was from the FRG. Initial, more open contacts on the political level (Ostpolitik) during the early seventies had not changed the fact that both systems derived their identity from mutual demarcation. For the two artists, their coming together now made it possible to uncover the usual ideas of the East about the West and vice versa as „clichés,” which, as is implied in the book Immendorff besucht Y (1979), need to be smashed. There, one sees a photograph of Penck swinging an ax, just about to crash it into an arrangement with the sign „Eingesperrt” (locked in). Immendorff, on the other hand, had surrounded himself for the photograph of his performance with West clichés, citrus fruits and a „Monopoly” set.

On the one hand, this friendship gave them the opportunity to see themselves as bearers of „ideology towers.” Immendorff has produced numerous variations on this topic - two figures walled in by their ideologies.

On the other hand, it was possible to see both regimes as similarly repressive - official debarment on political grounds from public service professions in the West, expulsion in the East. Today, such a view may seem slightly paranoid, with a hint of conspiracy theory.

But there was also something liberating about this possibility of equating the systems.

The situation became even more complicated because Immendorff belonged to a radical political organization. He was a member of a communist splinter group called ML, which had as its goal a reunited socialist Germany.

(2) Penck, in contrast, acted more like a „radical individualist” in his research on systems theory. From the very beginning, this friendship was politically charged and cannot be separated from its political functions. With this background, its highly official and staged character becomes plausible. Some of the rituals of friendship – signing pacts, publishing communiqués and official statements – are reminiscent of those of statesmen. What is decisive is that this friendship presented itself not as based on „shared beliefs” or on being „kindred spirits,” but rather on an original alienation. However, in order to thematize this friendship, a shared language and artistic agreements were necessary. While traditional friendship is still characterized by sameness, similarity, and attraction, here, „differences” and „distance” are cultivated. In a preparatory sketch for „Café Deutschland,” the two men, armed with pliers, cannot come together

because of the barbed wire; „too far apart” is written at the bottom. And Penck’s etching „Immendorff in der DDR” shows Immendorff putting a hammer and sickle into a cube, making his experiences in the GDR quasi presentable for a gallery. Why did these differences, always emphasized, not endanger the friendship? Because it was based in a „strong” tradition - that of friendship between men.

With a background of seemingly natural points in common - the shared gender and the divided nation - other differences were as it were of little consequence. Just like with the great friends of history, here, too, it is two men who try symbolically to overcome the wall .

This model of friendship by no means breaks with its androcentric structure. Brotherhood is the dominating scheme. But because it is based on the acceptance of differences and distance, the possibility of a different model of friendship is at least implied.

2. From a misrecognition to a „we” At this point it is important to remember that Penck originally had planned different paintings for this exhibition, but they were confiscated at the German-German border.

His harsh, explicitly fast painterly gesture can therefore also be read as an angry reaction to the arbitrary act of the GDR authorities. A comparison between his original contributions and the substitute productions shows that the former contain more explicit references to Immendorff, such as eye-catching symbols like the two German flags, two bees, or a candle. But Immendorff’s name, which Penck imprinted on these pictures as if with a stamp, is consistently misspelled - with only one ‘f’.

This slip could also be read as representative for Penck’s difficulties to accept the reality „Immendorff.” To misspell or mispronounce somebody’s name consistently is often a sign that one does not really want to deal with that person, that one keeps „forgetting” him or her. However, Immendorff’s look towards Penck necessarily had to misrecognize the latter, forcing him into a certain role. Penck belonged to the figures who keep reappearing in his paintings - a central component of his German-German narrative. In Penck, the narrative of German-German contacts, always threatened with failure, is, as it were, compressed. Immendorff extends his hand to Penck through the wall in vain. Occasionally

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SCENES OF A FRIENDSHIP

Penck’s face appears like a ghost on a mirrored pillar in the „Café Deutschland” series.

Did Penck play for Immendorff the role of the brother who, according to Derrida, always accompanies one? (3) He was at least one of his preferred alter egos, along with other living and dead artist friends, for example Guttoso or Beuys. At any event, his art, full of calls to action, needed Penck as its opposite.

Just like Immendorff liked to use the imperative - „Hört auf zu malen” [stop painting] (1966) is the most famous example of this - Penck’s artist books were also conceived of dialogically, such as for example ich bin ein buch kaufe mich jetzt [i am a book buy me now]. His written reflections are always directed at somebody with whom Penck, as it were, is holding a private conversation. Immendorff, too, had a tendency for „self justifications” and „self criticism.” To this day, he accords his (male) friends an important function as critics. (4) Both artists seem to be predestined for friendship because they thematize themselves in a similar way, they take an external perspective when looking at themselves. Furthermore, they share a preference for eye-catching, bold symbols, which, in the case of Penck, mutate into abstract signs. They are not afraid of exaggerated claims, as is clear in systems like „Standart” and „Lidl.” And their work depends on the notion of a „we,” even more so for Immendorff than for Penck. I am thinking here of Immendorff’s painted words from 1979, which argue that a good painting has to pose the question of a „we.” At the time of their first meeting, both artists where threatened with loosing this „we,” which of course always pushes one’s own demands.

Immendorff was at the height of his politicization - he himself says he was about to become a functionary. (5) But after the experiences with „Lidl” and „Mietersolidarität,” he was also well aware of the precariousness of group dynamics. Penck had also just ended a collective phase, his work in the painters group „Lücke.” (6) After these different involvements, both artists were probably interested in forming a „we” which did not endanger the autonomy of the artist. Its propagation was mainly left to Immendorff. For example, he put the words of the friendship pact on a banner-like canvass flag with a „flag stick” made up of pictures. In this way, the medium of the friendship was made public: pictures and painting. Painting was the vanishing-point and foundation of the connection. Occasionally, it even gave rise to

fantasies of symbiosis. On the red cloth which in „Alles geht vom Volke aus” (1976) is held and exhibited jointly by the figures „Penck” and „Immendorff”, for example, there is an explicitly exaggerated oath. There is talk of the intention of interconnecting their paintbrushes. Such dreams of fusing were clearly inspired by painting.

case, too, it was mostly a productive affair, it resembled a picture-production machine.

Every event, regardless of how seemingly insignificant, was potential artistic material. Immendorff gained from it a limitless spectrum of themes, from „Intershop” to „Wachtürmen.” His „Café Deutschland” series has been rightly interpreted as an imaginary space for the dialogues with Penck. (8)

3. Staged oppositions

In comparison to Immendorff, Penck exploited this „friendship” less aggressively. However, the East-West theme was also a leitmotiv in his work. His „standart” system was separated into „East’ and „West” motifs, and this dichotomy gave him new momentum and was very enabling. The usefulness of this friendship was inscribed into it from the beginning.

Supposedly, the two artists asked each other at their second meeting what they wanted from each other. (9) There was no secret about the fact that they intended to profit from each other. Just as today’s work relations are often mixed with „friendship,” not least due to the less rigid divisions between work and leisure, professional/artistic interests were part of this friendship. This was also the reason for their orientation towards results. It is part of the logic of artists’ friendships that the participants gain something (artistically) from it. In this respect, the artists’ friendship is also a harbinger of the current diagnosis that the capitalist commodity logic permeates even the most intimate relationships. Penck and Immendorff were under extreme time pressure - something that is also normal nowadays.

Naturally, Immendorff’s time in the GDR was limited. This also explains the remarkable discrepancy between the infrequency of their meetings and the extremely high output. This friendship contradicts the „traditional” model also insofar as geographical distance was one of its conditions. Already the it was similar to today’s frequent „long-distance relationship.”

Mutual obligations were less the result of a shared social practice, a shared everyday life, rather, they were the result of a contract. Even though the first „pact” was phrased rather generally, Penck still considered it binding in 1991. He said they had after all committed themselves to stick to the political task. (10)

Apart from these occasional demonstrations of unity, the staging of difference clearly prevailed. Even from its failure, this friendship seemed to draw strength. Indeed the moments of failure were turned into ritual. For example, a photograph showing the two artists in Penck’s studio in 1979 gives the impression of a more or less staged alienation. Penck and Immendorff are standing next to each other, leaving considerable space between them, and their body language and clothes signal above all distance. Immendorff seems athletic and wears leather pants. His gaze into the camera demonstrates a certain routine in representing himself. Penck on the other hand assumes a rather reserved pose. Leaning against the wall, his less well-trained body seems to draw back from the camera, and his look is skeptical. An invisible chasm seems to separate the two. To the same degree that their bodies seem to signal a certain reluctance, somehow they also seem to belong together - representative of the two German states. We owe the historicization of their first meeting largely to Immendorff. In his description of this episode he immediately emphasized that they talked at cross purposes. (7) He himself, he reports, wanted to paint pictures for Stalin and Mao Zedong, in reaction to which Penck uttered science-fiction phrases. It is, as it were, part of the myth of this dialogue that it consisted of two monologues. This myth also reflects a truth. We can assume that Penck had little interest in Immendorff’s politicization. Since the sixties, he was concerned with the natural sciences and the mediation of information, was less an activist than a systems theoretician. These different interests probably led to significant communication problems. But these could be quickly raised to a general level: that of German-German relations. Their meeting was therefore designed as an allegory. The symbolic charge of this „friendship” cannot be overemphasized. It is thus not surprising that the staged components were so pronounced. The image of this friendship was its social practice.

5. For an extended notion of friendship Not all aspects of this friendship can be reduced to „functions.” Undoubtedly it satisfied various artistic needs. As already mentioned, it gave the artists an (albeit imaginary) „we” and provided them with an audience as well as a theme. Furthermore, the practice of the

4. Friendship has its uses As with most artists’ friendships, in this

// ISABELLE GRAW

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one „friend” of course changes once he starts considering the real or imagined objections of the other. In addition, there is the allegorical form of this friendship, its function as a political metaphor. The fact that its very existence was due to a mediator points to the friendship’s „official” character. As the story goes, Michael Werner had told each about the other and arranged a meeting. This means first of all that their friendship was not based on spontaneous and mutual liking, but on a recommendation. In this respect, too, it anticipated a mode of meeting people which today, under the conditions of the „new economy” and „individualization”, has become the rule. Every „openness” for a new person is usually preceded by some kind of mediation.

But Michael Werner did not just initiate this relationship. He also fostered it with joint publications published by him. Or, as in the present case, with the reconstruction of the first joint exhibition. Like most galleries, this one, too, presets itself as a circle of friends, with a fixed system of coordinates of artists who are friends. The relationship PenckImmendorff is only one link in this tightly woven web. Which artist belongs is regulated by way of the friendship principle. Friendship is also the final reason given for possible exclusions.

For the outside world, the image of a sworn circle is maintained, an image which of course gives rise to external projections and exaggerated homogenizations.

How could this restrictive and exclusive model of friendship be integrated into an „extended notion” of friendship? Does the relationship of Penck and Immendorff represent one possibility for undermining the classic notion of friendship? Even though it is based to a considerable degree on misrecognition and distance? I think it can. Already the obvious asymmetry of their relationship speaks for an „extended notion of friendship.” It looks as if Immendorff accorded it more significance.

After all, he devoted an entire chapter of his

// ISABELLE GRAW

interview book to it. On the other hand, in his interview book Penck does not even mention the mythically charged first encounter. He mentions Immendorff in the same breath as his difficulties with Beuys and their „political kindergarten.” (11) This imbalance in the representation can also be seen as an opportunity. With it, the idea that this friendship is based on mutuality is refuted once and for all.

Perhaps this friendship, based on asymmetry, distance, and opposition, is a possibility for breaking its natural homogeneity, although it is based on an „intrinsic” homogeneity, namely that of brothers/men? The notion that someone else could have this friendship is at least theoretically implied.

Penck was the first who implicitly admitted this possibility when he organized a joint exhibition with Rosemarie Trockel in 1990; he staged this show as the result of a friendship.

But this friendship immediately moved into the suggestion of a love relationship. Friendship simply has no tradition as a heterosexual relationship. Thus, on the poster advertising the exhibition, then, Penck and Trockel are joined in a kiss. This cooperation was in the end similar to an opening, which since then seems to be present as a claim.

(1) in Kunst Heute No. 11, ed. Wilfried Dickhoff, 1993.

(2) Cf. also Diedrich Diederichsen in Immendorff’s Handbuch der Akademie für Adler, 1990.

(3) Cf. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 2000.

(4) Cf. also „Vorwort” by Immendorff in Immendorffs Handbuch der Akademie für Adler, 1990..

(5) Cf. also Kunst Heute No. 11, ed. Wilfried Dickhoff, Köln 1993.

(6) Cf. also Kunst Heute No. 6, ed. Wilfried Dickhoff, Köln 1990.

(7) Cf. also Kunst Heute No. 11, op.cit.

(8) Cf. also Siegrid Gohr in „PositionSituation”, Catalogue Michael Werner, 1979.

(9) Cf. also Kunst Heute No. 11, op.cit.

(10) Cf. also Kunst Heute No. 6, op.cit.

(11) Cf. also Kunst Heute No. 6, op.cit.

This text was published first in conjunction with the exhibition „Immendorff mal Penck, Penck mal Immendorff“ November 3rd to December 16th 2000 at Galerie Michael Werner/Köln (Translation: Wilhelm v. Werthern)

One reason that no friendship is limited to its functions is its indeterminate length. Friendships never have a definitive end. The shadow of the friend accompanies us even when we think we have nothing to do with him anymore. For this presence, it is irrelevant whether there are still feelings of friendship. Penck and Immendorff have repeatedly activated the mode of „friendship.” Penck, for example, read poems at Immendorff openings until well into the nineties. By way of magazine projects like Krater und Wolke, the gallerist also sought to stimulate friendly exchange. In spite or perhaps because of its obvious ends-oriented and staged nature, it is part of the nature of this friendship that the participants do not fully understand it. An inexplicable, arbitrary element of friendships remains which simply cannot be traced.

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AHOI BRAUSE BAR

MAU

project by Helene Arendt and Ole Classen Opening Friday, 19:00, opens Sat. & Sun. 14:00 – 19:00, Gartenstrasse 47

a bar project by Charles Esche, transferring your local liquor to fine scotch whiskey anywhere & everywhere

AN POITÍN STIL (THE POTEEN STILL)

PORTFOLIO

Distilling illicit spirits as art/not art by Dobz O‘Brien and Fergal Gaynor with the presentation of a GASTHOF NEWSLETTER Städelschule

project by Ben Jourdan, Lisa Jugert, Anna K. Otto: A collection of documentation on the work of all participating art students opening: Wednesday, July 24, 2002 at 21:00 h, open Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, from 11:00 – 17:00 h Städelschule / Aula

BUILDING UP OR REBUILDING STRUCTURE a recycling project by Marit Flåtter and Lucia Gustavsson Städelschule / various locations

SALON

CHINESE BEER BOTTLES

a beauty project by Isabel Friedrich open daily from 11:00 – 14:00 h and 17:00 – 20:00 h, Städelschule / W9

by Chunqing Huang LE THÉ-LEPHONE ARABE (arabic tea-phone) FAR AWAY SO CLOSE the Baht-Euro project by Tho Prachaya Phinthong Städelschule / Mensa GOOD NIGHT SLEEP PACKAGE designed by Tarje Gullaksen, Mia Rosasco, Danh Vo & Daniel Salomon to assure you a good night sleep whereever you sleep JUKE BOX choose your favorite film! project by Nora Schultz and Kerstin Cmelka the most wanted films will be presented, Sunday, 20:30 h Städelschule / Mensa

initiated by Mounir Elaloussi and Julie Marie, anywhere & everywhere TAKE AWAY a site specific project by Rodrigo Oliveira Städelschule / Mensa TRACE THE TRACE a photo project by Kristina Lenard wherever you eat TRAVELLING BAR serving Dry Martini cocktails by Olof Olsson anywhere & everywhere WASSERHÄUSCHEN

MANDARA mandara of cosmicparticle

by Mihoko Ogaki, Städelschule / garden

with Anette Babel, Steffi Kettel, Dogan Özdogan, Katharina Schücke Städelschule/garden, daily from 15:00 – 22:00 h WHITE ROOMS – BED ROOMS project by Angelika Schröder every day, except monday: 9:00 - 17:00

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ONGOING PROJECTS

FOOD

PANEL

LJUBLJANA BREAKFAST prepared by Sanja Ajdisek, Vesna Bukovec, Gregor Ceferin, Urska Florjancic, Natasa Jan, Katja Majer, Maja Malovrh, Luiza Margan, Zoran Srdic and Metka Zupanic Städelschule / Mensa

DERRIDA AND THE CONCEPT OF HOSPITALITY with Isabelle Graw, Charles Esche, Daniel Birnbaum Tent TEXT

TEXT READING „The Family” by Unn Fahlstrøm Städelschule / Aula

DEMOCRACY REVISITED a lecture by Audun Matthias Øygard around alternative methods of running a democracy Tent

PANEL SPORT UTOPIAN ACADEMY panel moderated by Clementine Deliss with John M. Armleder, Joseph Backstein, Thomas Bayrle, Jürgen Bock, Dobrila Denegri, Charles Esche, Robert Fleck, Dr. Ludger Hünnekens, Ronald Jones, Laurie Makela, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Tobias Rehberger, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Biljana Tomic, Heimo Zobernig and all participants of GASTHOF 2002 Tent FOOD BELGRADE SOUP prepared by Dragan Djordjevic, Marijana Gobeljic, Jelana Janev, Tijana Kneˇzevi´c, Olivera Markovic, Tanja Markovic, Jelana Martinovic, Srdan Nedeljkovic, Rastko Omcikus, Maja Rakocevic, Marija Skoko, Bojan Slacala, Milan Stosˇ i´c, Marko Stamenkovic, Ivana Smiljanic, Olga Ungar and Svetlana Volic Städelschule / Mensa TEXT SCENES OF A FRIENDSHIP: IMMENDORFF & PENCK Lecture by Isabelle Graw Tent

JULY 28 // SUNDAY

„TRA-KRO” RATAN BALL GAME FROM THAILAND an independent game initiated

by Tho Prachaya Phinthong Städelschule / garden FOOD VIENNA DINNER including DER KOMMUNIKATIVE WERT DER FARBE UND IHRE VERKOCHBARKEIT by Gabriele Sturm, Martin Kitzler and Markus Dressler with help of Smi Vukovic KÄRTNER REINDLING by Roland Kollnitz TV PIXEL PICTURE by Eva Beierheimer and Rüdiger Reisenberger EATABLE HEAD OF JOSEPH BEUYS by Thomas Ehgartner and Marta Mikulec CARVING PINEAPPLES by Miriam Laussegger FRIED CHOCOLATE BANANAS

by Richard Reisenberger Städelschule / Mensa COOKING WITH THE MAFIA (Recipes in Movies by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola) by Simone Bader Städelschule / Mensa MOST WANTED JUKE BOX-FILMS screening with Kerstin Cmelka and Nora Schultz Städelschule / Aula

EXCURSION DOCUMENTA 11, Kassel

JULY 29 // MONDAY

// MENUE LISBON

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// MENUE VIENNA

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1.Salsa di noci -

Walnüsse (geschält) Peccorino Knoblauch Salz Pfeffer Olivenöl Etwas lauwarmes wasser

In einem mörser die walnüsse mit den knoblauch geben und sanft zerstossen. Nach und nach peccorinostücke hinzufügen und mitverarbeiten. Ölivenöl dazu bis eine breiige zähe soße entsteht. Zum schluß salzen und pfeffern, eher sparsam. Die salsa mit ein wenig wasser verdünnen. Ziehen lassen. Zu fleisch oder mit pasta gemischt servieren.

2. salsa picante -

petersilie rote scharfe chilischoten knoblauch salz wasser essig

chilischoten mit heißem wasser überbrühen, die haut abziehen. Chilischotenfleisch in einem mörser geben und zum püree zerstossen. Genug salz hinzufügen und knoblauchzehen dazugeben. Petersilie sehr fein hacken und in eine schüssel mit der chilischoten-knoblauchpaste geben. Viel essig hinzufügen und mit kaltem wasser abschwächen.

Die salsa picante ist eher wässrig und wird zu alle fleischsorten, aber auch mit gegrilltem gemüse und aber auch nur zu gekochten kartoffeln serviert.

// MENUE FRANKFURT

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JANINE SACK

// RECIPES

LINNEA JACOBSEN

90/91

PEDRO VALDEZ CARDOSO

MICHAEL JOHANSSON

// RECIPES

92/93

KATJA MAJER

LILIAN SCHOLTES

// RECIPES

94/95

HANNA PETERSON

LUCIA GUSTAVSSON

HUO: There is, I think, a sentence which sums up quite well the relationship you have with your work today, you say: „Today, it is not the images which are beautiful, it is the chains”. I think this sentence could be the ideal point of departure for this conversation.

PP: Yes, though it’s maybe a bit encrypted.

What I often call chain is the dynamic structure producing the forms which constitutes it.

With beautiful I mean remarkable, I like this word, it’s the lament of Quasimodo, he always says: „beautiful, beautiful”.

A production is divided into three moments: the pre-production, the production and the post-production. These instances (parts, procedures) are dependent to one another. It’s during this sequence that meaning is produced, that the narrative takes place. An image, a building or a film can be seen as elements taken within a wider narrative structure; a structure they belong to and a structure they constitute at the same time. In robotics you use concepts as threshold of tolerance or linear adjustment, to describe this time interval in which some events are going to happen. The chain I ’m talking about is this non-site (nonspace), this space/time. A movie doesn‘t only tell a story, it is a part of a story. It’s obvious, but it’s strange that there are no novels taken from films. It’s another way of looking at things; you don’t think in terms of projections, projections of objects or scenarios. I don’t believe in the projective model. Does everything really starts with a scenario and end with an object? Does everything always finish with a happy-ending?

The degree of resolution you give to an idea depends on an economical choice you or someone else makes, this choice is eventually very little about aesthetic considerations but discursive. Architecture is a typical example in that sense – you can, from a project, end up with a simplified resolution or to the projects exacerbation. The project follows a cursor: high resolution/low resolution. In the end what I’m interested in, is not so much the resolutions but the procedures. From one image or let’s say a frozen moment, you can read all these sequences backwards, like a reader who would start a book from the end.

It’s really an experience of writing and reading.

Some art pieces are great scores. „You know doc, when something happens it can leave traces of itself behind, it’s like when you burn a toast.“ It is not necessary to have the shining to see these things. You can’t say that Liam Gillick’s works for example, are the scenarios of his visual work. First because they don’t always appear in this order, they are parallel to his practice. Like you wouldn’t say that Carsten Höller’s hermeneutic is the instrument of his work.

// HANS ULRICH OBRIST & PHILIPPE PARRENO

HUO: It seems that it is precisely these differences in the apprehension, the realization or the resolution of projects that motivate all the collaborations you see at the moment between artists and architects –in your case, the work you do with François Roche. According to you, since when does this common interest from architects and artists in exhibitions, experiments, ephemeral or indeterminate forms go back?

PP: These questions belong to a certain art or architecture practice you could perhaps date back to the fifties. These questions were arisen at the Black Mountain College in a both precise and soft way. The White Series Paintings by Raushenberg are brilliant for that. In a way the influence of the abstract expressionism on our generation is quite important.

Merce Cunningham projects a film on the painting; with his score of silence Cage gives a length to the painting. A statement is put forward. This statement, claiming that paintings can be repainted over and over because the white light they reflect will always be contemporary will of course not be honored.

It‘s the question of the immanent and the contemporary, it is a secular question. Here is a great chain of images forming around the exhibition of its paintings. Thomas Pynchon wrote that one of „the pernicious effects of the fifties were to be persuaded that those years would last for ever“.

All the same the history of architecture is still a history of objects. The same for the art history. For example, I have never seen, or maybe only once or twice, books about the history of exhibition.

HUO: This is a fundamental problem. You don‘t collect exhibitions, and in many cases they are not even archived. As soon as finished, they are forgotten. This amnesia, which affects the history of exhibitions, has deep and pernicious effects.

PP: Yes indeed. This summer the Stedelijk Museum had a show with the work of Dennis Hopper. Hopper belongs to the exhibition – the exhibition understood with the all the meanings of the term. He is a performer (interpret); his history would only go through in the permanent exhibition. Yet Rudi Fuchs presents him as a painter. Isn‘t it weird? It‘s all the same paradoxical in the case of someone who has done everything but painting to be presented like that. OK he painted the way he saw the others were painting, he interpreted it. With plaques and framed paintings on the wall. If it‘s only to please him, then you should talk about Daumier, about this realistic school meaning that the line was more important than the color. Because the line allowed to grasp life. Something like that. He might be a drawer since he is an interpreter. Perhaps those metaphors still have meaning. There is

amnesia because there is a lot of fetishism around art.

HUO: If there is fetishism, it is as you said, fetishism of the art object, or even of the object in general. Talking about this, it‘s striking how much the questioning of the object is recurrent in art; it disappears and reappears. In this perspective, the nineties represent a perfect illustration of this phenomenon because they show an explicit return to forms of questioning of the object, which had disappeared in the end of the eighties.

How do you see the way you deal with this question compared to how artist did it in the sixties-seventies?

PP: Since the eighties Sony and Thomson work on problems of resolution. The problem is not to make images but to make high-resolution image. This idea is a real virus. Yves Klein has sold emptiness. It‘s a question, which has been discussed politically and esthetically in the sixties-seventies. Today we still wonder but we‘ve lost the rhetoric. If I wanted to broach these questions with Larry (Lawrence) Weiner or Daniel Buren I would quickly sound like a neo-liberal an-alphabet with no brain.

Today we always raise this question as a work hypothesis. Have you seen the film Pleasant Ville? It tells the story of two teenagers in the nineties who fall into a television series of the fifties. Under their influence, the city and its inhabitants are going little by little from black and white to colors. What is interesting is that at the end of the film the city is not completely in fujicolor, it is only partly colored.

Greil Marcus compares Pleasant Ville to a film

by Don Siegle from which a remake has been made every ten years; it‘s the invasion of the body Snatchers. Have you seen this film? It‘s a fable telling the story of aliens devouring the body of their human host and then little by little replacing them by a society of replicants without soul. Those stories lead us to consider a success or a partial failure. They are traumatizing ideas.

HUO: Isn’t there all the same a form of dynamic, which would also explain why these forms of questioning reappear in the history?

PP: Yes, a liberal dynamic. They are identical questions you broach with your boss in the poolroom of the company, Friday, wearing jeans because on Fridays you can dress as you like at work. When you do workshops with art students, you realize that the teaching is always about the resolution problematic. The typical speech being: „You have a nice idea, but this nice idea, is it resolute

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EVER

in what you’re showing?” It’s always this mechanics trying to solve the problem in a form. But, what continues to interest me, what is fascinating, is when it’s overflowing. Either because there are too many ideas and too few forms, or because there are too few ideas and too many forms. It is the moments of irresolution, which are interesting. The dynamic of fluids is more interesting, its mechanics is more fascinating when there is no balance.

HUO: These are questions Lyotard raisedarisen already in 1985 in the exhibition: Les Immarériaux. Has this exhibition been important for you and for the artists of your generation?

PP: For me yes. It was a superb exhibition. It offered an analysis and an experience and the time; it also answered in the middle of the eighties all those questions about virtuality.

Some years later, at the school of the Palais de Tokyo of Pontus Hulten, I met Lyotard and talked with him about this exhibition.

The catalogue of Les Immatériaux was very beautiful, in two parts, printed on index cards.

The catalog was wonderful. It reported a series of exchanges between different people during a period of time; a sort of academic Internet network was used so that people could correspond. It was the first time Internet was used, not as an icon but as a tool. And the show in itself was absolutely surprising in the curatorial choices; in the way the things and experiences were arranged. There was no text, and yet you moved through a narrative written implicitly. It was a wonderful reading experience. But if you haven’t seen the exhibition, it’s difficult to describe it. If I tell how it was, it will sound like a dream. It’s like this story. There’s a bit tired guy who wants to rent a video. He goes up to the desk and ask: „I would like to rent a film but I don’t remember neither the title nor the director. On the other hand I know it’s a black and white movie, well, in black and white but in colors, especially in the end. Bruce Willis plays with superman in it. It tells a smooth story with a soft ground“.

HUO: Was it, as some have criticized Lyotard for, a philosopher exhibition?

PP: Les Immatériaux was an exhibition and therefore a way of organizing meaning, in specific time and space. But it’s different from the writing of a book or from the work consisting in bringing out a concept in philosophy.

And this was precisely what was beautiful in the show: despite it was organized by a philosopher, it wasn’t a conceptual exhibition. It was much more experimental, and in a certain way „liquid“. One of the surprising things in Les Immatériaux was the absence of concepts. There were many ideas but no concepts.

// HANS ULRICH OBRIST & PHILIPPE PARRENO

And so when I met Lyotard after the show, I asked him if he felt like doing a new exhibition. I also asked him if in his opinion the exhibition still was an interesting media. And he answered that he would like to do a new exhibition; he even had a title: „Resistance“.

Since, I’ve made up this exhibition in my head hundred times. When you talk about resistance, you think resistance to what? First you can bog down in moral question. But above all, when you study physics at school, the first thing you learn, is to neglect frictions. You say that frictions are neglect-able. So here, after Les Immatériaux, the warming, weightlessness, parallel energies, the resistance.

HUO: Why not try to do this second exhibition, Resistance, this project lying fallow? There, it would be a real effort against the amnesia of the history of exhibitions.

PP: Of course. You would have to find his notes. Has he written about this project? I would be gripping to dive back into it. You publish posthumous books, so why not an exhibition?

HUO: It would also be an opportunity to reintroduce a certain form of slowness in the exhibition world, which is, especially in the nineties, subject to an almost frantic multiplication of the number of exhibitions. In this sense too, it would be a kind of resistance.

PP: I think it’s a matter for the artists’ responsibility. Maybe, one way of resisting or questioning as Carsten Höller would say, is to break rather than accelerate, to create another form of dependency. A dependency of inertia.

HUO: When you bring up, among artists, the possibility of this kind of alternatives, what sort of projects do you imagine then? Are they exhibition, work or publishing projects?

PP: It is a question which constantly came back during the writing of Vicinato. And we thought that the book as archive and as medium could be a solution... Maybe at a certain point, the experience of reading becomes fundamental again. Because reading is also a physical state, it’s being in a particular attention, floating. When you disconnect from the reading, when you start to dream, these are very pleasant moments. You feel good in your head, imagining things, though someone is speaking to you at the same time. The floating listening of the analyst.

I would like to see a big book of images about the history of medical representation.

From Leonardo da Vinci to virtual reality and computer-generated images, all the techniques of representation have been invented by

the medicine. It would be fascinating to relate this adventure, the history of representation.

Why has the 3D representation of a liver been made before Terminator 2? I think this is fascinating...

Inevitably, there too, it’s a collective work.

A big scope of activities should be invested, beginning with history. It can only be done through a collective, a collective with different subjective points of view because it’s also a poetic project.

HUO: So, writing is a break; it’s also a form of narrative production, maybe more controlled than the one offered by the exhibitions.

PP: This is what is interesting in the perspective of the book. I have always felt a bit embarrassed when I wrote or red magazines like Purple Prose; I always felt I belonged to a story, which can’t be written. The cut-up of the magazine is absolutely not satisfying; after all it’s only a collage. It allows many different readings but these are not articulated. And I think the point of departure of a publishing project should be the will to find a main theme, a wire frame. The history is there but is not written. History is a fascinating field of research. The game with time is fascinating. Neil Stephenson who is a science-fiction author, plays with history, with projections in the past, and then projections into a hypothetical future. He wrote an essay called At the Beginning Was the Command Line, which is the history of computer interfaces.

Today ethnologists study the way the question of global warming is managed by nations; how nations get closer to negotiate. What are those new extra-national bodies? In the way mains drainage has redrawn cities, the anagement of fluids has always produced big changes. Today it’s the same, but it a gas, it is sublimated. But the Palais de Versailles had to evacuate smells. When Protestants abolished cult of incense, they allowed modern revolutions to happen. The Tokyo agreements take the history of the smell management into account. It would be a nice book. I would like to make a book about zoos. A geography book. Zoos are quite precise mirrors of how cities are thought. All that is histories of histories. They are histories of books.

HUO: We can imagine that the book project about copyright you’re working on, last for ten years. At the same time, we can see the Annlee project as already questioning the problem of copyright. Several temporalities superimpose on each other actually.

PP: Of course there are big differences between books and exhibitions. You can of

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course try to think step by step, you can do „pre-visualizations“, pre-editions, which may give an idea of the book, could be. But in the case of the copyright history, in the case of a history like that, the project can take several years. I would like to organize an expedition with a book being an element of exhibition as Cousteau’s books. The history of copyright is parallel to the history of individualism and of liberalism. It starts with the status of Anne in England. The history of copyright is the story (history) of a right belonging to the power, and by delegation given to the printer, and then from the printer to the publisher, from the publisher to the actor, from the actor to the author. Now we are there. Does the story end there? There is a multiplication of events like the Academy Award ceremony. Credits is getting longer and longer. Even in art shows you see credits now. The capital lives on authors. It’s a little bit what the Annlee project is about. This imaginary film deals with this: After having given the copyright back to the author, wouldn’t it be legitimate to give to the sign itself? This book about the copyright could and with the story of Annlee: the copyright from the king to the sign. Annlee is the sequel of Vicinato. How can several people find themselves in one image and share it? This is what interests me and continues to present me with problems. This is what is so fascinating in working together with others. Here is an image –it happens to be a small manga character, but it could as well have been a cyclone or a dog- in which several people would be able to recognize themselves. Like a standard. Do you know this book Peintres et vilains (Painters and „non-nobles“: farmers etc.) written by Pianzolat, he’s an art historian, he describes a pre-Marxist revolution attempt in the beginning of the 16th century led by slaves (in French serf: „slaves“ of the lords in the middle-age) and farmers. An insurrection starting in Germany. The book tells the story of a farmer who travels all over Europe looking for a painter able to draw the standard of the revolution. Annlee is also the story of a freeing and a community finding itself in an image. Snow Dancing also attempted to define a community.

HUO: How is Annlee’s future?

PP: At the end it will be a monographic group exhibition. It is still about the sharing of a biography. It will take place at the SF MOMA in May 2002; all the films will be collected.

Pierre and I have insisted on not haunting all the films in the same room in order to avoid a „Pokemon“ show. Visiting the museum you would run into Annlee as into a ghost haunting different works. It’s really a proposal for a group show, the show being included in each piece as a motive. It’s going to be an unusual group shows. It’s not that I have something against group shows. It’s always interesting to look for what is monographic in a group show

// HANS ULRICH OBRIST & PHILIPPE PARRENO

or what is collective in a monograph.

HUO: About group shows, except from Les Immatériaux, is there any group exhibition, which have particularly marked you?

PP: There was NO MAN’S TIME, and some shows curated by artists. There was also Le Procès de Pol-Pot/The Trial of Pol-Pot, a show we did with Liam [Guillick] at the Magasin in Grenogle. All the space was treated as one object. The walls were white. Some extra walls had been set up. On each wall there were text fragments, questions were written in black Helvetica. Some texts were there for graphical reasons. It was a psychotic environment in black and white, which looked like a scenery from the Avengers. The show was easily reproducible. By taking photocopy of a photocopy from the show you wouldn’t loose much. I was very important that the show could be faxed to anybody, and that anyone could easily imagine how the show looked like without any loose of information. That it could easily be described as I just did. During a year, some consultants we had chosen – some artists and critics chosen especially because we wanted to avoid ending by doing a bronze sculpture- discussed this exhibition, some discussions were very interesting. Liam wrote a lot during the whole project. The exhibition wasn’t a moment of clearness. At the time we arisen this question about the trial of Pol-Pot, Clinton began to deal with it.

It was perfectly concomitant. What was very interesting was that the reality and the artistic proposal were played at the same time. The real trial took place in the jungle, and there was no sentence, those facts were both fascinating. Once again, it was a very unclear moral positioning in the mechanics of history.

HUO: Is there any written trace of this history (story: in French histoire) in the history?

PP: Paul Ardenne wrote a text in the magazine Parpaings, other texts have been published as well. We thought about making a catalog with all the matter written during the production of the exhibition, but it was very difficult. Which could those texts have?

Publish archives belongs to a para-scientific vocabulary. There is no catalog. In the same way in the trial there was no sentence, and only few foreign observer were present. The rare accounts had to confine to facts. The exhibition could also end like this: In the absence of a verdict, nothing is solved.

HUO: And what about the project of the temporary school which was also an alternative form of intervention in the art world, but this time more specifically in relation to the art schools?

school in a space and in a time, with a start and an end. When Jacques Guillot opened the Magasin in Grenoble, it wasn’t supposed to last. What we wanted to do, was a school able to move. In order to have the event directly in the school, you can bring the school to the event. The problem with art schools is that the teaching isn’t based on something live. You repeat things there. Rare are the examples, like in the case of Pontus Hulten, where after you’ve been talking about Lyotard for three hours, he actually appears in the middle of the class. The school is usually a place where no live things happen. In a way the teaching is based on something mystical concerning the contemporary practices.

Instead of talking about films, you should go and see them. So it’s very simple actually: go where the things are. Today, you can do it, it’s quite easy. So why would present things dealing a thing which is dealing with the thing?

Why not deal with the real directly.

HUO: The temporary school was based on a policy you qualify as transdisciplinary. You can also see this aspect in your own work: you have collaborated, in some projects, with other artists and in others, with people from other disciplines than visual arts.

PP: The problem with working with others, well the problem and the interest of course, is the project. It’s not about agreeing on everything, but at one moment on one particular project. That’s enormous, without a common ideology we constantly need a link between each other. To have desire together is a good palliative to get the feeling of a community.

The problem with collaborations between people from different fields is to agree on the space you’re talking from. Sometimes, it’s all the more complicated since art is something sticky. Like in the case of Dennis Hopper, there is always a moment when an actor gets compared to a painter. Sometimes it’s very difficult to define this field. But when you get along with people who have knowledge of art, it’s worth to try. And then it becomes interesting because you can go deeper into this space. Actually, this space can have several names. It’s a beast with several heads.

HUO: We could maybe remind what these collaborations are and have been.

PP: With people who are not artists? I work with François Roche, I’ve worked with Dave Stewart, with Charles de Meaux for the movie, and then with Dagmar Berghoff who is a journalist. She presents the television news in Germany. She’s a bit like Christine Ockrent in France. With her, I made a television news.

We imagined the television news like a story and we tried to tell it instead of saying it. We

PP: The temporary school is temporarily stopped (laughter). The idea was to imagine a

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wrote a text, which were broadcasted at the same time everyday on the public channels.

It was in Hamburg. For me there was a way of broaching the information without analysis or presentation the facts: telling a story, transform facts into stories, into fairy tales. To accomplish this type of work you need more time. The reading time of the information is longer and consequently you have more time to imagine things. We recorded the text at the Kunstverein of Hamburg. It was very interesting, she explained me that by contract she had to tell the truth. She’s a girl who is not allowed to lie. She said to me: „I’ve been presenting the television news in Germany for twenty years now, and when people see me on the screen, they believe what I say. I can’t appear in a film and say anything. By contract I don’t have the right“. So we had to find an information, which was true but at the same time could be told like a fairy tale. We told the story of some Maoists in France, some „established“ who at a moment left university to set themselves up in the factories to prepare the revolution. Some are still there. It is the case of some of Althusser’s student for example. So she told this information, but she told it like a fairy tale. It was a ten minutes long program broadcasted everyday at the same time; it was an information in loop. An art experience because an art piece is also in loop. It’s strange to always see the same information like the film by Aramis: Le Jour de la Marmotte.

Dagmar Berghoff is used to comment on events, here she tells the story of the life of those who have been waiting for an event.

Godard starts a film with this sentence: „The cinema, said André Bazin, substitutes what we usually see with a world which goes together with our desires, Le Mépris is the story of this world“. It’s also this story.

very interesting to work with him because we had two completely different approaches.

What brought us together was this will to tell an information like a fairy tale. We did a documentary on a region of the world called Pamir on the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Five years ago, nobody talked about it, though it has always been a keystone of the area. We tried to film this region, which had just been through a civil war, it was a real waiting situation. If CNN wasn’t there, it was because there were no images to get. We wondered how to film a non-event.

What I imagined was to do a film like you make an exhibition, to think the distribution of the film also. I wanted to do a radio broadcast with a film in it. The film would have last for thirty minutes and the radio program an hour and a half. When the film finishes , the radio broadcast continues, the soundtrack continues. So, the film was a part of a bigger radio-broadcast. The idea of exhibiting the film, of distributing it, was: each time the film is shown, a local radio channel would do the broadcast, in which you would hear the sound of a film shown in a movie theater, The film would synchronize itself to the radio program. The would always be showed in live.

You could have entered the theater with the light on and wait for the film to start listening to the radio. But then there was Charles’ view, we had to agree on a compromise.

PP: Charles de Meaux is a filmmaker a bit atypical. He’s a real novel character. He is finishing his first feature film with Romain Duris, Caroline Ducet and Melville Poupaud. It is a very atypical character who was a jockey.

He did steeplechase and one day he had an accident. He remained blind until he got a cornea transplant. Then he organized rock concerts. He’s the one who organized the Clash tour in France. Then he met Alain Cavalier for whom he worked as an assistant for the film Thérèse. That’s the way he got into the cinema. With Charles, we did a documentary, Le Pont du Trieur/The bridge of the sorter. It was

// HANS ULRICH OBRIST & PHILIPPE PARRENO

HUO: Here it is not the artist who joins in a project led by an architect, it’s the other way round. Is it still an art project or has it completely become an architecture project?

HUO: What was the compromise?

PP: The compromise was to film a radio program, a fiction of a radio program, and keep this as narrative structure. Me, with my a bit twisted practice, I had the tendency to try to find a radio station in order to make the film.

HUO: Do you still collaborate?

HUO: And what about the collaboration with Charles Meaux?

have to go through. In the total obscurity it’s a bit scary, like the ghost train in Prague where you get the feeling that the slightest spark would set fire to the tons of dust accumulated there since the cold war. It is not the plastic skeletons but the confinement, which is frightening. So we went on the spot with François and when we arrived, just before the tunnel, we saw the supports of a railway bridge constructed by Eiffel at the time where the canals of Bourgogne actively participated in the development of the industry. With François we quickly realized it would be interesting to do the project. The sleeping partners needed a restaurant. So, we started to think about this bridge restaurant like the ones built on highways by Jacques Borel. We had Eiffel and the industrial revolution, Jacques Borel’s highways and today’s the river tourism. This was three generations. We work a bridge and a lightening system. It’s a highway project with many ghosts. The constructions of Eiffel were based a triangular module beams. In our construction we use iron wires, which are welded together each time they cross each other.

The beams stem from a different engineering.

The bridge arises interesting architecture problems.

PP: Yes, together with Pierre Huyghe and Xavier Douroux, we created, for the film, a production house, Anna Sanders Films; and it’s a company we still use. The collaboration takes different forms but it still continues.

HUO: Let’s talk about the project you and François Roche are working on.

PP: With François Roche, because the architecture process is much longer, the collaboration first starts to materialize now. We are going to build a bridge.

PP: What is the share of the artist and what is the share of the architect? That’s a question, which interests François especially in relation to a production strategy. Art can be a way of thwarting the ratification mechanisms. We both sign the project, we made the proposal of building this bridge for example. It wasn’t what we were asked in the beginning. That was also something interesting for him. A robotized fluorescent tube will lighten the tunnel. The first studies will be ready this winter, in October or November, and the construction starts in 2003. We did an architecture object, which isn’t one piece, because it includes a bridge and the lightening of a tunnel. Two points are enough to make a straight line.

For me it isn’t the bridge the most important, neither the lightening of the tunnel. It’s both. It is this non-space they define. Well, of course the bridge is so strange, so it is what I want to see most now.

It started with an invitation to participate in project of redevelopment of the canals in Bourgogne. There is for example a three kilometers long tunnel without any light the boats

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FOOD TOULOUSE BREAKFAST prepared by Jean de Sète Denant, Renato Ercoli, Chantal Font, Theotime Gerber, Martin Gielen, Lars Hayer, Quentin Jouret, Chad Keveny, Fouzia Kissi, Alice Kok, Emilie Roland, Yves Sonolet Städelschule/Mensa WORKSHOP

ELDORADO an exhibition project, by Célia Domingues, Daniela Silvestre, Luis Colaço, Max, Rodrigo Oliveira, Sérgio Leitão and Mariana Ramos Städelschule/Aula BOAT TO BOATS project by Ayse Erkmen.

A boat transfer from Dürerstrasse to Daimlerstrasse. Departure of the boat in front of the Städelmuseum

CRITICALITY. A READING WORKSHOP with Søren Grammel and Maria Lind Städelschule

SPORT

ART

BOAT RACE competition initiated by Adrian Williams Daimlerstrasse / canal

ALGURES/LUGARES presentation by Inês Sénica, Mariana Ramos, Marta Burnay, Tiago Madeira

BAR

FRIDA/HERIDA presentation by Angel Masip, Mário Pires Cordeiro Städelschule / Aula

BAR with Michael Pfrommer, Mandla Reuter and special KABUL by Ioan Godeanu Daimlerstrasse ART

NON GRATA PRESENTS video program about Eastern – European political performances Städelschule / Aula

WORMS TO MOVE.. - GIVE 1, GET1! by Zero R. Ishihara Daimlerstrasse

FOOD

FOOD

CLUJ SOUP prepared by Tiberiu Bleoancâ, Alina Bungardean, Idena Cosma, Mircea Coza, Adriana Elian, Botond Tamás Ferenczy, Nicoleta Mocanu, Dan Piersinaru, Tihamér Török Städelschule / Mensa

PIZZA! PIZZA! PIZZA! Dinner project by Simon D. Møller: all pizza delivery services of Frankfurt delivering pizza for all participants.

Daimlerstrasse MUSIC

FOOD DEALERS OF FRANKFURT presented

by Jean-Baptiste Maître at PORTFOLIO FOOD GASTHOF SOUNDTRACK live broadcast at radioX on 101,4 fm or via www.radiox.de/live/index.html ART

JENSEN / MÜLLER / SCHREINER in concert Daimlerstrasse FLOYD, DIE KATZE VON GESTERN with Husain/Richter/Jensen/Meise Daimlerstrasse CLUB CLUB with Audun Matthias Øygard, Jörg Eibelshäuser & friends Daimlerstrasse OFFCOURSOTHEBOYS presenting „house of chicagooo” Daimlerstrasse

JULY 30 // TUESDAY

FOOD VILNIUS BREAKFAST prepared by Raimondas Dicius, Raimondas Krukonis, Dainius Lanauskas, Zilvinas Landzbergas, Vilius Maciulskis, Martynas Martisius, Rokas Petruskevicius, Vidas Puodziunas, Arvydas Slaustas, Edita Valaite St채delschule / Mensa DEPARTURE / GOOD BYE

JULY 31 // WEDNESDAY

// PROJECT BY CAMILLA AGDLER, ERIK JOERG, CHRISTOFFER PAUES, MATS STJERNSTAEDT, ALEXANDER VAINDORF // STOCKHOLM

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// PIZZA! PIZZA! PIZZA! A PROJECT BY SIMON DYBBROE MØLLER // REBELS VISITED – THE JOHN McENROE WORKSHOP FEATURING: PETER JANSEN (McENROE EXPERT), PETER KLÖS (ANTHROPOLOGIST, MÅRTEN SPÅNGBERG (THEATRE MAKER) A PARCEL PROJECT BY JACOB DAHL JÜRGENSEN & SIMON DYBBROE MØLLER

// PROJECT BY TUE GREENFORT

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// PROJECT BY CHARLES ESCHE

How can contemporary philosophy be useful to contemporary art and its institutions? The question is phrased not in order to draw up some form of hierarchy or point of origin and response, but rather to try to clarify how philosophy can be utilised for another discipline. It also comes from a personal uncertainty about the superficially close relationship between the two. I am clear that art does not make good philosophy, though it might become interesting precisely when it misunderstands what a philosopher is saying. Equally, philosophers who stray onto the territory of art regularly seem to do so without the necessary equipment to identify genuine artistic inquiries from marketing strategies. And of course curators are neither fish nor fowl in this company, which has it’s own advantages.

It was with some reluctance that I, together with Isabelle Graw and Daniel Birnbaum, stood up to speak about Derrida’s concept of ‘unconditional hospitality’ at Gasthof. I did not want to claim that I ‘understood’ Derrida.

Probably deliberately, the proposal he makes is likely to provoke misunderstanding. He seeks ‘unconditional hospitality’ to the point where the host might at some point simply withdraw from the house where the guest has arrived, handing over ownership, language, culture and all vestige of his authority.

He uses the concept to provoke a question about the appropriate European response to global emigration, demanding that the host ‘says yes’ under all and every circumstance.

In all practical applications, his notion seems absurd or at least unworkable, yet he insists on it as a genuine proposal, even instruction, to shape social behaviour. He has been accused of naivety as a result and seems to

// CHARLES ESCHE

embrace the accusation. I don’t know quite why he does this or how it plays in its own philosophic context, nor am I so interested.

But, with some intellectual trepidation, I can see potential in the idea and would like to see if it is useable for my own ends.

As someone responsible for an art institution, ‘unconditional hospitality’ offers a way of thinking that dramatically modifies the understanding of the job. Not only does it shift thinking but it also shifts the possibility of thought.

Whereas a traditional ‘director’ is charged to act as a gatekeeper, selecting and allowing artists into the sanctum of the exhibition space, encouraging but controlling the response of visitors to those exhibitions and manipulating as much as possible their critical reception, an ‘unconditional host’ would have to do things differently. He or she would need to respond to demand, though probably initially such demand would need to be generated through negotiation with individuals and collectives.

He or she would be required to be flexible, to change structures on request and open up the function of spaces that had already been allocated for certain purposes. Above all, he or she must be hyper-attentive to the local situation, whether geographically or to the global locality of the art world. Ultimately, he or she must anticipate redundancy and his or her departure from the formal role held in the institution that was previously the source of authority.

too easily self-justifying. So, if ‘unconditional hospitality’ has a usefulness for contemporary art, let it be to urge us to strive for our own uselessness. Under its rubric, we may create the conditions in which the art institution really does become a kind of self-propelled, collective Speculation Machine for its own city and for artists sharing the protected space of the international art world. Of course, such a project still requires disciplinary co-ordinates, but different ones from what either the established museum or art centre provides. Derrida’s proposal of unconditional hospitality can serve as one axis for a new set of institutional coordinates – and that is a good enough use of philosophy for me.

I see the desire or anticipation of redundancy as one of the most inspiring consequences of my selfish interpretation of ‘unconditional hospitality’. I am committed politically and emotionally to the idea of self-organisation and the art world is in many ways a paradigm for such possibility. Yet its rhetoric often excludes the anticipation of the end of any particular self-organised project and it can become all

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SPECULATION MACHINES OR WHY DON’T YOU LEAVE THE INSTITUTION AND GO AND DO SOMETHING MORE USEFUL INSTEAD?

Imagine you are a guest at a very elegant cocktail party. Your hosts offer you a glass of cognac as they introduce you to a mix of international artists and critics. You are seduced by congeniality itself. You are happy to be at the table. As you begin to feel more comfortable, your hosts open a box of cookies especially made for this occasion by Laduree, a 150-year old patissier in Paris. You are not hungry but you feel you must accept because your hosts have offered something they value. Instead, you wait to see what others do. As if an extraordinary amount of sugar and butter is not enough, your hosts offer important knowledge about the special cookies in the beautiful box. You conceal how surprised you are to learn that each cookie contains one or the other of the following: „For this educational-memorial we have provided one-half ounce of dust from the site of Mercy Corps Relief Station 31. Without question this example from the station contains human remains.” – Excerpt from correspondence accompanying container of dust from a bomb site in Afghanistan suspected to be a terrorist encampment, but was, in fact, a Relief Station filled with children, doctors, nurses and relief workers. „...Transporting one-half once of powdered lunar dust from Lunar Sample number 98874-334...“ It has been determined by scientific analysis that the lunar sample is inorganic, but it remains undetermined if exposure to the sample, for long or short periods of time, creates a risk to humans, animals or plants. –Excerpt from correspondence accompanying Lunar Sample from NASA’s Lunar Sample Display.

The twelve guests around you are angry and quiet. Someone mumbles something about the Last Supper. Your American hosts suggest that the unusual ingredients in the cookies symbolize our struggle with issues of altruism, heroism, morality and ethics. You cannot hear what they are saying. You are not motivated to eat these cookies. You are especially not motivated to talk about these cookies, or your hosts „extreme” hospitality. One of the guests says he would not, under any circumstances, eat human remains.

Another said that cannibalism is not the problem. The problem, he said bitterly, is that there is too much meaning.

// LAURIE HAYCOCK MAKELA & RONALD JONES, LOS ANGELES, NOVEMBER 2002

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THE BANQUET OF MERCILESS REGRET

...sunshine Palmsonntag 2003... ice eating polish people on their march to the church – and the birds make tweedtweedtweed... I like it! In a way it`s so average like our Gasthofparty was – more than half a year ago... Where 200 students with their teachers from all over Europe sat and chatted arround... No – they did not chat – they did a lot more... they talked to each other... – They made a collective construction out of their individual bricks and stones... For one week there was exaggeration/form/melting together – merging cheese running into one another... yes food...selfmade food from Leningrad till Nantes...was mixed with a manifesta and documenta mood...(o boy ...this rhymes)... Dass es besser war, als sonst etwas, behaupten immer alle von allen Events... Aber unser Treffen war kein Event – und auch kein Trend – Es war „erhaben“... hinweg über den Graben – der individuellen Einsamkeit...

// THOMAS BAYRLE

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TAKE IT SATCH!

COLOPHON THIS PUBLICATION IS PRODUCED IN CONJUNCTION WITH GASTHOF 2002 July 24 - 31, 2002 Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Frankfurt am Main Dürerstraße 10 D-60596 Frankfurt am Main Tel.: +49 -69-605008-29 Fax: +49 -69-605008-50 gasthof@staedelschule.de www.staedelschule.de DIRECTOR Daniel Birnbaum CONCEPT & ORGANISATION Dirk Fleischmann, Jochen Volz CATALOGUE Dirk Fleischmann, Jochen Volz TRANSLATION Shannon Bool, Karl Hoffmann, Daniel Salomon PHOTOGRAPHY Alex Campos, Pedro Cardoso, Luís Colaço, Célia Domingues, Tue Greenfort, Ramiro Guerreiro, Jacob Dahl Jürgensen, Pedro Lagoa, Sérgio Leitão, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Dogan Özdogan, Chiara Picotto, Sascha Pohle, Ana Sofia Ponte, Ana Roque, Fernando Ibero Rosenheim, Rodrigo Santos, Katharina Schücke, Maria Teresa Silva, Daniela Silvestre, Michaela Spohn, Rui Tiago OFFICIAL GROUP PHOTOGRAPH (P. 126) Miriam Backström & Carsten Höller DESIGN Jacqueline Jurt & Harald Pridgar, Frankfurt/M. Günzel.Rademacher, Offenbach COVER Jacqueline Jurt & Harald Pridgar, Frankfurt/M. PRODUCTION Günzel.Rademacher, Offenbach PRINTING ......

EDITION OF 1000 © Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main and authors, 2003 ISBN 3-928071-63-7 GASTHOF 2002 has been supported by Allianz Kulturstiftung, Munich Hessisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst, Wiesbaden International Foundation Manifesta, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Manifesta 4 / European Biennial for Contemporary Art, Frankfurt am Main